After a court ordered the Internal Revenue Service to rehire some 7,000 probationary workers, the employees were put on administrative leave — kept on the federal payroll, but not back at work.

Now it’s tax season and the bosses at the IRS need those erstwhile employees at their desks.

A notice to probationary employees — fired in February and reinstated in March — directed workers at the U.S. tax collector to prepare to return to “full duty” by April 14 — one day before the country’s taxes are due, according to a copy viewed by Bloomberg News.

Between now and the agency’s most important date on the calendar, workers will be picking up new federal ID badges, powering up computers they turned in when the terminations hit in February and negotiating remote work arrangements in cities where the IRS doesn’t have office space. 

For employees who don’t want to come back, the notice provides an out: workers can send an email to decline to return and resign from the agency.

But management said workers don’t need to give up jobs they took in the weeks since the Department of Government Efficiency first initiated the firings — in what could be a sign of the IRS’ manpower needs as tax returns roll in.

“Please know that outside employment does not necessarily prevent you from returning to work,” the message read.

The IRS declined to comment.

These roughly 7,000 employees were fired in February as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort to slash the U.S. government’s workforce. But a federal judge in Maryland ruled last month that 18 agencies, including the Treasury Department which oversees the IRS, had to reinstate their fired probationary workers, as the courts continue to weigh the legality of the job cuts.

At the time, unions said that bringing workers back onto the federal payroll, even keeping them on leave, would reverse the economic hit of the layoffs and restore affected employees’ health benefits. 

Still, the Trump administration’s longterm goal of cutting the IRS workforce in half is expected to dramatically raise wait times for customer service functions, including helping individual filers with tax returns. It’s also likely to be good news for tax cheats, tax experts said, since it will cramp the agency’s ability to audit returns, including some of the wealthiest people in the country.

Former U.S. tax officials urged the Justice Department not to dismantle its tax division in an agency-wide reorganization, warning that such a move would hobble enforcement. 

More than 60 lawyers wrote Wednesday in response to a March 25 memo by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that called for a broad reorganization of the department, including reassigning tax lawyers around the country while keeping a “core team of supervisory attorneys” in Washington. 

“Dismantling the tax division would do a grave disservice to tax administration by destroying consistent and competent application of our tax laws,” the lawyers wrote. Many of them served in top posts at the tax division and the Internal Revenue Service. 

The letter, also signed by leading tax practitioners, comes as senior officials in the Justice Department’s antitrust division are trying to shield key aspects of that work from the cutbacks. The cuts are part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to downsize the federal government. 

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment on the letter. 

The tax division’s 350 or so lawyers work in 14 civil, criminal and appellate sections and support the IRS in collecting taxes and prosecuting fraud. They work closely with the 93 U.S. attorney’s offices across the country and approve all tax prosecutions.

But the division is smaller than several others at the Justice Department and hasn’t had a Senate-approved leader for more than a decade. The IRS had cut back on tax enforcement cases for years, and Trump vowed to reverse hiring increases backed by former president Joe Biden. 

Division lawyers pursue a wide range of cases, including multibillion-dollar disputes like one involving Caterpillar Inc., as well as prosecutions over tax preparers and tax shelters. They have pursued cases over COVID-19 payments, cryptocurrency scams and bankruptcy frauds. 

“The tax division is successful in carrying out this difficult and diverse mission because of principles it is designed around and fosters: technical competence, centralized leadership and collaboration,” the tax experts told Blanche in the letter. They “regularly litigate cases against the nation’s best-trained and best-funded private sector tax lawyers.” 

Many of those lawyers signed the letter, including former IRS commissioner Charles Rettig, former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and Michael Desmond, a former IRS chief counsel.