The IRS lost two key directors working on Crypto initiatives Seth Wilkes and Raj Muhaji on Friday after accepting an offer to resign from the government’s efficiency department.
Wilks and Mukherjee, both of whom went to the IRS in the Crypto industry, are technically IRS employees for the next few months, but are on paid administrative leave as of Friday afternoon. President Donald Trump’s administration, through Doji, offered to postponed resignation earlier this year to a wide range of federal employees.
Wilkes, formerly vice president of Taxbit, and Mukherjee, formerly the tax chief at Consency and Binance, both joined the IRS Digital Assets Initiative in February 2024, and were tasked with helping the IRS build a crypto-tax-friendly approach, including institutional efforts to guide the IRS to steer the agency’s efforts to build crypto-tax-based programs. They worked on the updated 1099-DA tax form shared last summer to help those submit taxes related to digital asset transactions.
The pair also oversaw part of the agency’s efforts to draft tax rules for the crypto industry.
The IRS completed one such rule and imposed certain data collection requirements on distributed finance (DEFI) brokers on the decline of the former Joe Biden administration. The rule was overturned by Congress earlier this year under the Congressional Review Act in a joint resolution signed by Trump.
Wilkes was the executive director of digital asset strategy and development for the IRS, and Mukherjee was the executive director of Digital Assets Office.
Both people who spoke with Coindesk noted that two officials accepted the voluntary takeover, but these postponed resignations came before the expected cuts on IRS staff.
More than 20,000 IRS employees have registered for the postponed resignation program, The New York Times reported last month, and those employees took administrative leave until September.