In the last few months, some of my friends have resigned from the service. Good officers, with good reasons. And like anyone who watches that happen, I have been introspecting on the pros and cons of staying on.
One of the first things you need for an informed decision is a picture of the future the service itself holds for you. Not a hunch. A model.
Ask around in the IRS about promotions and you will hear the same thing:
“You will become a PCIT in so many years, and a CCIT by so-and-so year.”
These are rough estimates, going by how promotions are happening today. The trouble is that today’s pace was set by batches that look nothing like ours.
The batches are not the same size
The officers at the top of the service today come from small batches. From the late 1990s, only twenty to thirty-odd officers per batch are still serving. The batches from 2013 to 2017 each have between 250 and 366 officers on the rolls, direct recruits and promotees together.
The number of posts at the top has not grown in the same proportion. So “PCIT in 28 years” may have been true for a batch of thirty. Assuming it will hold for a batch of three hundred is not an estimate. It is hope.
And people now join later
The age of entry has changed too. Direct recruits now join at about 27 or 28 on average. In the late 80s and early 90s it was closer to 26. Someone who joins later also retires sooner, so attrition could be faster than we think, even though the batches after 2007 are large. Two forces pulling in opposite directions — which is exactly when guessing stops working.
So I built a model
For my own selfish purposes, as a sarkari babu whose only avenue for career advancement is promotion without cutting the line, I took the IRS Civil List 2024 and built a model of the Income Tax cadre.
The civil list has what is needed: every officer’s civil code, date of birth, date of joining the IRS and date of entering the present grade. The model moves the whole cadre forward month by month:
- every officer retires on the last day of the month they turn 60;
- up to Joint Commissioner, promotions are time-bound, as they are in practice;
- from Commissioner upwards, a post falls vacant only when someone above retires or moves up, and it goes to the senior-most officer who meets the minimum service in the recruitment rules.
From this, the tool tells you the month a vacancy would arise against your seniority in each grade. That is the earliest you could be promoted to that rank. The actual promotion could come later, and would depend on the efficiency of HRD, the “mood” of DoPT, the “kundali” of your batch and what not.
What surprised me
The biggest surprise was how little your place in the batch matters, and how much your date of birth does. A batch moves up more or less together. Whether you are at the top or the bottom of it, you reach Commissioner around the same time. What decides your last rank is how far the batch has climbed by the month you turn 60.
Within the same batch, the officers who joined young will see the top grades. Those who joined late — including many promotees — will retire a rank or two below them, with their batchmates still climbing.
The second surprise was the cadre itself. There are far more vacant Commissioner posts than I had imagined, and the posts above that are almost all filled. The tool lets you choose between sanctioned and working strength, so you can see both versions of your future.
Try it
IRS Career Outlook → imvishnu.com/tools/irs-career
Enter your civil code. If it is in the civil list, nothing else is needed. You will see your career rank by rank, how many officers stand ahead of you in each queue, and how your whole batch is likely to retire.
It gives a reasonable estimate, not a promise. I have stated all my assumptions on the page, and there could still be errors in the model. If you resign early on the strength of this tool and it turns out to be wrong, all I can offer in consolation is a cup of tea in my office (since you won’t have one anymore 🙂).
Now have fun checking when you — or that batchmate you are secretly jealous of — will get promoted. :)
What would you want such a tool to tell you before you make a call like this?