The IRS lost two key directors working on the initiatives of Crypto, Seth Wilks and Raj Mukherjee, Friday after accepting the delayed resignation offers led by the Ministry of Government.
Wilks and Mukherjee, who both went to the IRS in the cryptography industry, are technically still IRS employees for the next few months, but they are on administrative leave paid on Friday afternoon, two people familiar with the situation in Coindesk. The administration of President Donald Trump, through DOGE, has offered deferred resignations to a wide range of federal employees earlier this year.
Wilks, who was previously Vice-President of Taxbit, and Mukherjee, who was previously consensys and Binance.us’ US, the chief of the tax, both joined the IRS Digital Asset Initiative in February 2024, and was responsible for helping the IRS to create a better approach to cryptographic taxation, in particular by conducting the efforts of the agency Compliance and application of crypto and industry coordination programs. They worked on a 1099-DA tax form shared last summer to help people with taxes related to digital asset transactions.
The pair also supervised certain parts of the agency’s efforts to write tax rules for the cryptographic industry.
The IRS has finalized such a rule, imposing certain data collection requirements on decentralized financing brokers (DEFI), in the decreasing days of the former administration Joe Biden. This rule was canceled by Congress earlier this year under the Congressal Review Act in a joint resolution signed by Trump.
Wilks was the IRS executive director of digital asset strategy and development, while Mukherjee was executive director of Digital Assets Office.
The two people who spoke in Coindesk noted that the two officials had accepted voluntary redemptions, but that these deferred resignations were before the expected discounts of IRS staff.
More than 20,000 IRS employees signed up for the delayed resignation program, the New York Times reported last month, these employees being on administrative leave until September.
