Two high-ranking IRS crypto tax officials have abruptly called it quits. Seth Wilks and Raj Mukherjee, directors of the IRS Digital Asset Initiative, submitted their resignations on May 2, 2025, after barely warming their government seats for a year.
The plot thickens. Both officials accepted “DOGE Deferred Exit Deals” – yes, you read that right – under the Trump administration‘s Department of Government Efficiency program. Talk about a bureaucratic mic drop. They’ll stay on the payroll for several months, enjoying paid administrative leave while the crypto tax world scrambles to adjust.
This couldn’t come at a worse time. The mandatory 1099-DA form implementation is looming, and now the very people who helped design it are heading for the exits. Their previous experience in the crypto industry made them instrumental in developing these new tax policies.
Wilks, former TaxBit VP, and Mukherjee, who cut his teeth at ConsenSys and Binance.US, brought rare industry expertise to the regulatory table. Now that expertise is walking out the door. The agency is already struggling with staffing cuts that will see one-fifth of employees gone by mid-2025.
Their brief tenure wasn’t exactly quiet. The duo managed to oversee major crypto tax initiatives, including updating the 1099-DA form and finalizing a controversial DeFi broker rule – which Congress promptly killed through a joint resolution. So much for that work.
The resignations leave a gaping hole in the IRS’s crypto tax leadership. These weren’t just paper-pushers; they were architects of the agency’s digital asset reporting standards and compliance protocols.
Their industry backgrounds made them uniquely qualified to bridge the gap between crypto innovation and tax regulation.
The timing is particularly awkward for crypto investors and businesses, who now face uncertainty about how their transactions will be tracked and reported. The IRS just lost two key players who actually understood the crypto industry – a rare commodity in government circles.
The DOGE program, apparently designed to trim government fat, has managed to carve away some pretty essential organs instead. Who knew a program named after a meme coin could cause such serious disruption? Welcome to 2025, folks.
