When We Join, and What We Bring: Reading the Civil List, Part 3

Part 1 looked at how old the service is today, and Part 2 at who will be left in the field. This part goes back to the beginning: how old we were when we joined, and what we brought with us.

The civil list gives every officer’s date of birth, date of appointment to the IRS and educational qualifications. The difference between the first two is the age at entry. For a direct recruit, that is the age at joining after the Civil Services Examination. For a promotee, it is the age at promotion from Income Tax Officer to Assistant Commissioner.

Direct recruits join at about 28

The age at joining rose through the 2000s, peaked at about 28.5 for those who joined between 2005 and 2014, and has eased since to 27.7. The change shows most at the ends. Among those who joined between 2010 and 2014, nearly a third were 30 or older. Among those who joined in the last five years, fewer than one in five were, and the share who joined before 25 has almost doubled since the late 2000s.

The table starts at 2000 for a reason. The civil list shows only officers still in service in July 2024, and everyone born before mid-1964 had retired by then. Of those who joined in the 1990s, only the ones who joined young are still here, so the earlier figures look younger than those batches really were: 25.8 for 1990–94 and 26.7 for 1995–99, with few over 30. They describe the survivors, not the batches.

Promotees join at about 54

For promotees, the same problem is much worse. They are promoted in their late forties or fifties, so anyone promoted more than a few years ago at an older age has already retired. Of those promoted in 2016, for instance, nobody who was over 51 at the time is still in the list. The averages for older promotion years therefore say nothing reliable about the age at which promotees were promoted then.

Only the most recent rounds are complete enough to read:

A promotee today becomes an Assistant Commissioner at about 54, after twenty to thirty years in the department, and retires at 60. Whether that age has risen over time cannot be told from one civil list. Older lists would answer it.

What we bring: two in three are engineers

Each officer’s first degree, for the direct recruits who joined in each period:

In twenty years the service has gone from a third engineers and a third Arts graduates to two-thirds engineers.

The two doors bring very different degrees. Across the whole service, by first degree:

Promotees come mostly from science and commerce; direct recruits, more and more, from engineering. About three in four of the service’s commerce graduates are promotees, and two in three promotees retire by 2029 (Part 1).

A legal and accounting service with few lawyers or accountants

The department’s work is taxation, and taxation runs on law and accounts. An assessment order is a quasi-judicial order; every addition is argued before the appellate authorities, the Tribunal and the courts; and every case begins with a set of books. Yet:

• Law is the first degree of 1% of officers, and of none of the 208 officers of the 76th and 77th batches. Only 2.4% of those two batches hold a law degree of any kind.
• Chartered accountants, cost accountants, company secretaries and CFAs together are 1.6% of the service, and none of the 208 newest officers.
• Commerce is the first degree of 4% of the direct recruits who joined since 2015.

The engineers, doctors and scientists who make up most of the service bring other strengths: analysis, method, comfort with numbers and systems. But the law and the accounts, they learn on the job.

The older entrants bring more

Among direct recruits who joined since 2015, too recently to have studied much in service, the share with a postgraduate degree rises with age at joining:

An officer who joined at 32 is three times as likely as one who joined at 24 to arrive with a master’s degree, and far more likely to be a doctor. The civil list does not record work experience, but a degree or two and the years after them are much of what a late entrant brings.

And what we add later

Officers keep studying after they join. Across the service, 12% hold a law degree, against 2.4% of the newest batches, and a quarter of the most senior direct recruits do. What we study after joining, and who studies what, is a later part of this series.

Age at joining decides the last rank

Retirement comes at 60 for everyone, whatever their batch. So two officers of the same batch, with the same examination, the same training and the same seniority, can end their careers in very different places, depending only on how old they were when they joined.

The career outlook tool runs every officer of a batch forward to the month they retire. For the direct recruits of three batches, this is the rank each retires in, grouped by roughly how old they were when they joined:

Within a batch, every three years of age at joining costs roughly one grade at the end. An officer who joined at 25 and a batchmate who joined at 33 sit in the same seniority list for thirty years, and retire two or three grades apart.

What it means

The officers who bring the most have the least runway. The late entrants arrive with the most education, more of them as doctors and postgraduates, and they are the ones whose careers will end at Commissioner or Principal Commissioner. The early entrants, who will lead the service, arrive with the least. Neither is a judgement on anyone. Both follow from the age of retirement.

The skills the work needs most are learned after joining, if at all. The department’s work is taxation: law, accounts and, more and more, data. Almost no direct recruit arrives as a lawyer or an accountant. Much of the service’s grounding in commerce sits with the promotees, who are retiring. What legal and accounting expertise the service will have in ten years, it will have mostly because it trained its officers, or because individual officers went and got it.

The top of the service is drawn from those who joined young. In each of these batches, the officers who will reach CCIT and Pr. CCIT are almost entirely those who joined before 29. It is also why the top posts change hands so often (Part 1): even the youngest entrants reach them only in their last few years of service.

Promotees bring the most experience, and have the least time. At about 54, a promotee brings two or three decades of the department’s work into the IRS, and has about six years to use it there.

What could change

• Record and use what officers bring with them. A record of each officer’s degrees, earlier work and skills, kept from induction and updated through service, would let postings draw on what each officer knows by design rather than by chance. The civil list already prints qualifications; it needs only to be kept current and used.
• Build the skills the work needs, on purpose. With two-thirds of new officers engineers and almost none accountants, accounting, law, international taxation and data analysis will have to be learned in service. A standing programme of sponsored study in these fields, open to every batch rather than to a few, and linked to the postings where the skills are used, would make that learning systematic instead of a matter of personal initiative.
• Value careers that are not only about rank. If, by arithmetic, many officers will retire as Commissioners, then the service gains from recognising depth in a field, such as international taxation, investigation or litigation, through postings, tenure and responsibility, not only through promotion.
• Tell officers early. Projections like the ones above can be made for every officer from the day they join. Shared openly, they let officers plan their careers, their studies and their deputations with a clear view of where the arithmetic is taking them.
• Use the promotees’ years well. With about six years in the IRS, a promotee’s postings could be planned as a whole from the day of promotion, so that the experience they bring is used where it counts most.

The age limits for the Civil Services Examination are set for all the services together, and are outside the scope of this series.

About the data

Source. The Civil List 2024 of the Indian Revenue Service (Income Tax), as on 1 July 2024: date of birth, date of appointment to the IRS and educational qualifications for every officer.

Assumptions.

• Age at entry is the date of appointment to the IRS minus the date of birth. For a promotee, it is the age at promotion to Assistant Commissioner.
• Qualifications are printed as free text, in about 1,470 different spellings. Each officer’s first degree is placed in one field: Engineering or Medicine if the officer holds either, otherwise the first degree listed. A postgraduate degree is any master’s, M.Phil, PhD, MD or postgraduate diploma. 297 officers have no qualifications printed and are left out of the education figures; about 3% more list only “graduation” or similar and are not shown in the first-degree tables.
• A law degree is any LLB, BL, LLM or integrated law degree. Accounting qualifications are CA, CMA (ICWA), CS and CFA.
• The table of last ranks comes from the career outlook model: retirement at 60, promotion up to Joint Commissioner after fixed periods of service, and promotion above that by seniority as posts fall vacant, using sanctioned strength. Future batches are added at 203 officers a year, the model’s middle scenario. Age at joining in that table is approximate, taken as of the end of the batch year. The table covers direct recruits only.

Limits.

• Only officers serving on 1 July 2024 are in the list. For direct recruits who joined before 2000, and for promotees promoted before 2022, the figures are distorted by those who have already retired, which is why they are left out of the tables.
• Qualifications are self-reported, and some officers have clearly not updated theirs since joining. The education figures are a floor.
• The model’s last ranks are estimates. They depend on posts staying at their sanctioned numbers and on promotions being made as posts fall vacant.

Next: how many of us are women?