How Old Is the IRS? Reading the Civil List, Part 1

Last week I turned the IRS Civil List 2024 into a model of the cadre, to see when I might make CCIT. Once all 4,398 of us were sitting in one table, it started answering questions the model was never built for. How old is the service? How old were we when we joined? How many of us are women? What did we study, and what have we studied since?

So this is a short series on what the civil list says about the people in the service, one question at a time. This first part is about age. The numbers describe the service as it stood on 1 July 2024, the date the civil list was prepared.

Before we begin

This series began with two cups of tea and one question: how much can the civil list tell us about the IRS? Quite a lot, it turned out. The tea is not an official source, and neither is this series.

Everything here comes from documents anyone can find and read: the Civil List 2024, DoPT’s service-allocation lists for the Civil Services Examination, vacancy figures for the examination as reported in the press and on coaching sites, a reply given in the Lok Sabha, a CBDT office order, a letter from the Income Tax Gazetted Officers’ Association, and one study in The Lancet. Where a figure rests on something less solid than an official document, I say so.

What I know of the cadre rules and procedures, I have picked up along the way, most recently as DCIT (HQ), Pune. It is a good seat from which to watch how the department works, and a modest one from which to explain it. Where I have a rule wrong, I would be glad to be corrected, and I expect I will be.

The sections called “What could change” are thoughts offered in passing over the data. They are not advice, and certainly not to seniors who have thought about these questions far longer and know far better. They are meant to start a conversation about the future of the service, not to settle one.

So please read all of it with a generous pinch of salt (not in the tea). The views are mine alone, and not those of the department or the Government.

Two services in one

The average IRS officer was 46.8 on 1 July 2024, and the median officer 49. The youngest was 23. The oldest was 59, because nobody in the service is 60: that is the day it lets you go.

The average hides two very different services. Direct recruits average 39. Promotees average 55.5.

Direct recruits are spread fairly evenly from their late twenties to their mid-forties. Promotees are all at the far end: two in three of them are between 55 and 59, and only one is under 40.

By rank, the average age climbs about the way you would expect:

Promotees sit outside this ladder. A promotee DCIT averages 54.7, older than a direct-recruit CIT and close to a Pr. CIT.

A third of the service retires within five years

1,430 officers, a third of the service, were 55 or older on 1 July 2024. All of them retire by the end of June 2029. They include:

• every Pr. CCIT, every CCIT, all four Members and the Chairman (132 officers);
• 206 of the 272 Pr. CITs (76%);
• every promotee CIT, 95% of promotee Addl./JCITs and 54% of promotee DCITs/ACITs;
• 36 direct recruits below the rank of Pr. CIT: 30 CITs and 6 Addl./JCITs. No direct-recruit DCIT or ACIT retires in these five years.

Officers retiring each year:

The first column counts retirements only among the officers in the civil list. The second adds retirements among promotees who will join the IRS after July 2024 and retire within a few years of joining, assuming 100 promotions a year at the ages of recent promotions (54 on average). By the early 2030s they make up about half of each year’s retirements, so the later years depend a great deal on how many are promoted.

Officers are counted at the rank they held in July 2024. Some will be promoted before they retire, but they will still retire in the same month.

What it means

The people at the top hold their posts for very little time. On 1 July 2024, a Pr. CCIT had on average eight months of service left, and 24 of the 26 had less than two years. A CCIT had a year and four months on average, and 73 of the 101 had less than two years. A region’s head changes almost every year. Anything that takes longer than a year to build, such as a change in how a region handles its scrutiny cases, a litigation strategy, or a working relationship with the state government, depends on the next person wanting the same thing.

The service is leaving faster than it is joining, but only on one side. Officers enter the IRS through two doors, each with its own vacancies. Direct recruits come through the Civil Services Examination, against the vacancies the department reports to UPSC for direct recruitment. Promotees come from the Income Tax Officers’ cadre, against the promotion quota, through DPCs. The two are counted and filled separately, so they are worth reading separately:

On the direct-recruit side the service is growing again, after four years of small batches (more on those in the next part). On the promotee side it is shrinking by about a hundred officers a year, and the promotions come in irregular rounds: 338 in 2023 and none at all in 2021. At this pace, the service has some 550 fewer promotees in 2029 than in 2024, while the cadre table already shows about a thousand sanctioned posts unfilled (5,021 sanctioned, 4,034 working). The retirements are already fixed: they were decided the day each of us was born. What is not fixed is how quickly the promotion roster is filled behind them.

Promotees spend a short time in the IRS. Those promoted since 2020 became Assistant Commissioners at 54 on average (more on this in Part 3), and leave at 60. The 1,056 promotees aged 55–59 are among the service’s most experienced field officers: most of them spent twenty years or more as Inspectors and ITOs before they joined the IRS. They retire within five years of each other, and with them goes something no file holds. In a faceless system, records pass easily from one officer to the next. What does not pass is the ground-level intelligence of an officer who has worked a charge for years, and the judgement that comes from decades of dealing with every kind of situation the field produces. That is lost to the department in a snap, on the last day of the month in which each of them turns 60.

And some leave before 60. In a reply in the Lok Sabha on 25 November 2024, the Ministry of Finance gave the number of IRS (Income Tax) Group A officers who took voluntary retirement each year. It was 14 to 20 a year from 2014 to 2017, 23 to 35 from 2018 to 2020, and 53 to 58 every year from 2021 to 2024: 383 officers in eleven years, 226 of them in the last four. The reply does not say whether they were direct recruits or promotees. Voluntary retirement generally needs twenty years of qualifying service, so most are likely to be promotees and senior direct recruits. Either way, about 55 officers a year now leave early, on top of the 280 who retire. None of the figures above count them.

The field’s direct recruits are at the age when families are made. A direct-recruit ACIT or DCIT is 34 on average, and 651 of the 751 are in their thirties. Of the 1,740 direct recruits from ACIT to Addl./JCIT, 1,550 are between 30 and 45. Officers now marry later, more of them have a spouse with a career of their own, and many have young children and ageing parents at the same time. As Part 4 will show, more of them are women than ever before. Transfer and posting policies were written for a different service. The demanding charges, such as the Investigation Wing, rightly come with strict tenures. Balancing those against the needs of the individual officer will be one of the harder jobs of the next decade, and morale depends on getting it right.

The field’s promotees are in their late fifties. 1,071 of the 1,110 promotee ACITs and DCITs are 50 or older, and 599 are 55 or older. As the field thins (Part 2), more of the demanding charges, in the Investigation Wing and the central charges, will fall to them: long hours, searches, deadlines, sustained pressure. This is the age at which lifestyle diseases catch up with almost everyone. Among all Indian adults, the ICMR-INDIAB study (The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, 2023) found 11.4% with diabetes and 35.5% with high blood pressure, and the rates rise with age. A yearly medical check-up is not enough for a workforce with this profile doing this work.

After the wave, the opposite problem. Promotees rarely reach Commissioner, so the posts at the top open up only as direct recruits retire. From 2031 to 2034 that is 35 to 55 a year, just as the large direct-recruit batches that joined in 2013 to 2018 (CSE 2012 to 2017), 135 to 165 officers each, start arriving at Commissioner rank. The next five years open senior posts faster than people can fill them. The five after that will have queues. The career outlook tool shows where each batch lands.

What could change

• Plan each door from its own retirement curve. Every retirement for the next 35 years is already known to the month, and so is whether the officer came in as a direct recruit or a promotee. A rolling five-year projection of both, published with the civil list, would let the direct-recruitment requisition to UPSC and the promotion roster each be planned years ahead instead of one year at a time. For the next five years, most of the work is on the promotion side: about 210 promotees retire every year, and about 100 are promoted.
• Hold DPCs before the vacancies, not after. This applies to the promotion quota into the IRS and to every grade above it. Each year’s retirements by grade are known a year ahead. A panel drawn up in advance would let a post be filled the day it falls vacant. Promotion rounds of 338 in one year and none in another leave posts empty and officers waiting, both at once.
• Write transfer and posting policies for the officers we have. For a field whose direct recruits are in their thirties, that means taking spouse postings, children’s schooling and ageing parents into account as a matter of course, not as exceptions. Demanding postings with strict tenures, like the Investigation Wing, could be planned further ahead and with the officer’s circumstances in view. A compassionate policy and the needs of the service are not opposites: a posting an officer can sustain is one where they do their best work.
• Bring health and welfare up to modern standards. For older officers in demanding charges, that means regular, continuous health assessment rather than a single yearly check-up, workload norms for the heaviest charges, and amenities such as a gym in the office building. The same is worth doing for everyone; it matters most where the work is hardest and the officers are oldest.
• Find out why officers leave early. About 55 officers a year now take voluntary retirement. An exit conversation with each, and published figures by grade and by direct recruit or promotee, would show whether the reasons can be fixed.
• Keep what retiring officers know. Local intelligence and long experience pass from person to person, if at all. An officer’s last year or two of service could be planned for that: working alongside younger officers in the field, especially in investigation and survey work; passing on what they know of their charges to the intelligence and investigation wings in a structured way; and teaching at NADT and the RTIs. Officers who are willing could stay connected for a fixed term after retirement, as trainers or advisers.
• In the long term, think about bringing promotees in younger. If departmental promotion brought ITOs into the IRS in their forties rather than their fifties, perhaps through a limited competitive examination alongside seniority, promotees would spend a decade or more in Group A instead of six years, and the service would keep their experience longer. This is not a quick fix. It would mean changing the recruitment rules, and it touches the careers of everyone in the feeder cadres, so it needs long-term thinking and thorough consultation with all the stakeholders, the officers’ associations among them, before any change is made.
• Publish the data, and invite others to study it. This civil list came after a gap of six years. A yearly list with a machine-readable version, along with figures on vacancies by roster, voluntary retirement and postings, would let the service see its own shape. Opening that data to independent researchers, in universities, research institutes and within the service, would bring in perspectives that the Directorate of HRD, working on its own, cannot supply.

A larger question: continuity at the top

A Pr. CCIT with eight months of service left cannot be expected to change much, and no one should blame the officer for that. Other services have dealt with the same problem in different ways: a minimum term in a few key posts, regardless of the date of superannuation, as state police chiefs have, or choosing a head’s deputies and successor together so that a plan outlives the person. I am not suggesting either. They are questions for the service as a whole to think about, and in the larger picture: not as a matter of promotions, or of who holds a post at a given time, but of whether the public is served by regions that can follow one plan for longer than a year.

About the data

Source. The Civil List 2024 of the Indian Revenue Service (Income Tax), published by the Directorate of HRD, CBDT. It is the 23rd edition and covers serving officers as on 1 July 2024: 4,398 officers, including 208 trainees of the 76th and 77th batches. The list is a PDF; I had a program read it into a table and checked that every section’s serial numbers came out unbroken. Date of birth is printed for every officer.

Assumptions.

• Age is in completed years on 1 July 2024.
• From CIT downwards, the list marks each officer DR (direct recruit, through the Civil Services Examination) or PR (promotee). Pr. CIT and above are not marked. I have counted them as direct recruits, because all 404 of their civil codes follow the direct-recruit pattern.
• An officer retires on the last day of the month in which they turn 60, or the last day of the previous month if they were born on the 1st.
• Retirement counts use each officer’s rank in July 2024 and ignore promotions in between.
• The estimate of retirements with promotees yet to come assumes 100 promotions a year from 2025, with ages at promotion spread like those of the 536 promotees promoted in 2022–2024 (54 on average).
• Intake is measured by date of appointment to the IRS: the joining date for a direct recruit, the date of promotion to Assistant Commissioner for a promotee. The two are filled through separate rosters and are counted separately here.
• Direct-recruit intake for CSE 2022 to 2025 is taken from the service-allocation lists and reported vacancies described in Part 2.
• Remaining service is measured from 1 July 2024 to the month the officer turns 60.

Other sources. Voluntary retirement figures: Lok Sabha Unstarred Question 79, answered on 25 November 2024 by the Minister of State for Finance, as reported by The Tribune and Deccan Herald; the figure for 2024 may cover only part of the year. Health figures: Anjana et al., ICMR-INDIAB national study, The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, 2023, adults aged 20 and over.

Limits.

• The list shows only officers serving on 1 July 2024. Anyone who left earlier is missing, so the yearly intake figures for earlier years are slightly low: a few officers from those years have since resigned or died.
• Batches that joined after the list was prepared, the 78th onwards, are not in it.
• The projection of the promotee strength is rough. It assumes promotions continue at the last five years’ average and ignores resignations and deputation.
• The reading of the PDF may hold a few small errors. None of them moves any figure here by more than a fraction of a point.

Next: who will be left in the field, as the large batches move up and the promotees retire.