What Do Tax Collectors Do?

The responsible tax collector authority for the government of the United States is that of the Internal Revenue Service. These tax collectors can also be referred according to the acronym IRS. A tax collector agent in the United States will accordingly fulfill his or her functions and duties under the broader infrastructural framework of the Department of the Treasury. Moreover, all tax collectors in the U.S. are directly accountable to the authority held by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue.

In all, as of 2010, the number of tax collector agents was placed by the agency itself as comprising some 106,000 employees who have thus been empowered to fulfill a variety of functions in holding citizens to their tax obligations under the law and providing the U.S. government with sufficient funds for it to function. Moreover, a tax collector is also empowered through, and directed to provide for, the legal source of the Internal Revenue Code, or IRC.


This office of tax collectors in the U.S. can be traced back in its history to the period of the United States Civil War, when newly imposing budgetary burdens were placed on the federal government to carry out military measures against the Confederacy.

In this regard, the tax collector post of Commissioner of Internal Revenue was put into effect when President Lincoln signed Congress’s Revenue Act of 1862. Thought this period put into effect the precedent for tax collectors being empowered to collect income taxes, this power was only securely granted during the later Progressive era.

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