There is no published figure for the New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing. A public records response covering Division of Taxation enforcement activity (response C255751) did not include collections staffing levels or a collections-specific budget for fiscal years 2022 through 2025. Treasury confirmed that the figure was not tracked for the categories requested. That gap was flagged during the original review of the records as a priority target for a follow-up public records request, alongside other untracked categories such as wage garnishments and tax lien filings.
New Jersey's own published budget documents, the Governor's Budget and the Office of Legislative Services' Analysis of the New Jersey Budget, provide staffing and spending trends for the entire Department of the Treasury. These documents are prepared and released each year to support the Legislature's budget process and are freely available on state websites, offering a verifiable public benchmark even where a specific figure for collections staffing is unavailable.
The Division of Taxation is one of several divisions inside that department, so the figures that follow describe the department as a whole and are not a substitute for a true New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing count. The underlying enforcement figures, including the Offer in Compromise acceptance rate and collections revenue, come from a separate public records response covering the same four-year period.
New Jersey's tax enforcement data shows more bank levies, more warrants of execution, and a lower settlement acceptance rate between fiscal year 2022 and fiscal year 2025. A natural question follows: Did the New Jersey Division of Taxation add collections staffing or more money to carry out that enforcement? The public records response to request C255751 does not answer that question directly.
The Government Records Access Unit's response to request C255751 covered application counts, acceptance rates, collection actions, audit totals, and appeals activity for fiscal years 2021-22 through 2024-25. It did not include staffing levels for the Collections and Enforcement unit, nor a unit-specific operating budget. This gap was identified during the original review of the records and was flagged as a candidate for a follow-up public records request, since the division did not volunteer staffing or budget figures alongside its enforcement statistics.
The Division of Taxation is not a freestanding state agency. It sits inside the New Jersey Department of the Treasury alongside the Division of Revenue and Enterprise Services, the Division of Pensions and Benefits, the Division of Investment, the Division of Purchase and Property, the Office of Management and Budget, the New Jersey Lottery, and other units. New Jersey's annual budget documents, the Governor's Budget Detail and the companion Office of Legislative Services budget analysis, report staffing and appropriations at the department level. They do not publish a separate line for the Division of Taxation's headcount or a breakout for New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing specifically. Department-wide totals are therefore the most specific figures a member of the public can verify without an additional records request.
Each spring, the Office of Legislative Services publishes a Personnel Summary for the Department of the Treasury, comparing the number of funded positions to the number of positions actually filled. The most recent edition of that analysis, covering the FY2025-2026 budget, restates the prior four years in a single consistent series.
Department-wide, the number of funded positions rose every year in this window, from 5,483 in FY2022 to 5,754 in FY2025, an increase of about 4.9 percent. The more notable shift is in the unfilled column. In FY2022, 312 funded positions across the department sat vacant. By FY2025, that number had fallen to 105, even as the total number of funded positions grew.
In practical terms, the Department of the Treasury funded more positions and filled a larger share of them each year through this period. That is consistent with a department that expanded operations, though it does not identify which divisions absorbed the new hires or resolve the question of New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing specifically. The Division of Taxation has publicly posted hiring notices during this period for roles tied to its Tax Systems Modernization Project and to newly created property tax relief programs, which is a plausible destination for some of this growth, but the published data does not confirm how many positions went to collections and enforcement.
Looking only at FY2022 through FY2025 risks missing whether the recent staffing growth is unusual or simply a return to an earlier level. The Office of Legislative Services' FY2025-2026 budget analysis includes a ten-year chart of funded and filled positions for the Department of the Treasury, which puts the recent numbers in perspective.
Filled positions at the Department of the Treasury actually declined for four straight years, from 5,374 in FY2017 to 5,105 in FY2023, before reversing sharply in FY2024 and FY2025. The FY2025 filled count of 5,649 is the highest in this nine-year window, and it arrived in the same year the Offer in Compromise acceptance rate fell to 12 percent, and collections revenue reached $53.5 million.
This longer view supports the same conclusion as the four-year comparison: something changed department-wide starting around FY2024, and the timing overlaps with the enforcement trends in the FOIA data, but the public record still does not isolate New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing from the rest of the department's hiring.
One specific, verifiable Division of Taxation budget item did surface in New Jersey's legislative budget review process: the Tax Systems Modernization Project. Unlike the department-wide totals above, this figure is tied directly to Taxation's own tax administration and collection systems, which makes it the closest thing to a division-specific budget data point available in the public record, even though it still stops short of a staffing count.
In January 2022, the Division of Taxation awarded a contract to Revenue Solutions, Inc. to replace its separate tax administration and collection systems, some of which dated back to the mid-1980s, with a single integrated platform internally known as STAR. The project was awarded a fixed budget of $85 million. According to the department's response to a Fiscal Year 2025-2026 legislative budget question, total expenditures reached approximately $38 million, and an accepted change order for $4.2 million brought the total contract value to just over $89 million.
The system's first phase, an online taxpayer portal offering real-time access to filing and payment options, launched to the public on May 14, 2025. The department has said the full four-phase project is expected to be completed by fiscal year 2028. Because this system underlies how the Division of Taxation processes filings, tracks payments, and manages collection accounts, its rollout is a more direct piece of budget context for enforcement operations than the department-wide totals discussed elsewhere.
The modernization project's timeline overlaps closely with the staffing rebound described above. The contract was awarded in early 2022, near the start of the four-year enforcement window covered by response C255751, and its first public-facing phase went live in May 2025, the same fiscal year in which department-wide filled positions reached their highest point since at least FY2017. A system migration of this scale typically requires additional staff for testing, data conversion, and taxpayer support during rollout, which is a plausible, though unconfirmed, contributor to the department's recent hiring. Whether any of that support work involved New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing specifically is, again, a question only a unit-level records request can answer.
The Fiscal Summary in the same Office of Legislative Services analysis reports the department's total appropriation from all funding sources: the State General Fund and Property Tax Relief Fund combined, plus federal funds and other dedicated funds. Because each year's analysis is published before the fiscal year closes, the figures below mix two labels used in the source documents: an adjusted appropriation, which is the amount budgeted, and an expended amount, which is what was actually spent once the year ended.
Two things stand out. First, the department's all-funds total grew substantially across this window, roughly 67 percent from the FY2022 adjusted appropriation to the FY2025 adjusted appropriation. Second, actual spending in FY2023 and FY2024 came in well above what had been recommended for those years when the budget was first proposed, which reflects mid-year supplemental appropriations added by the Legislature after the initial budget was signed.
Neither the growth nor the supplemental spending can be attributed to tax enforcement specifically. The Office of Legislative Services' own highlights for these budgets point to a different explanation.
Reading the highlights sections of each year's budget analysis makes clear that most of the department's growth traces back to property tax relief, not to tax administration or enforcement.
The Affordable New Jersey Communities for Homeowners and Renters program, known as ANCHOR, expanded income eligibility and added renters for the first time since 2010, then grew again as participation climbed toward two million households by FY2025. The Senior and Disabled Citizens' Property Tax Freeze program raised its income threshold to $150,000 and cut its residency requirement from ten years to three, which the department had expected would add 58,000 newly eligible participants in a single year The new Stay NJ Property Tax Credit Program, funded for the first time in this window, added another $600 million dedicated appropriation for FY2026 on top of $300 million pre-funded in prior years.
Each of these programs sits in the Division of Taxation's administrative orbit, since Taxation evaluates applications and determines eligibility, but the dollars themselves are property tax relief payments to residents, not enforcement funding.
New Jersey's budget documents organize appropriations by department and, within a department, by broad program classification such as Direct State Services, Grants-in-Aid, and State Aid. They do not publish a line item for a specific operating unit inside the Division of Taxation. The same is true of staffing: the personnel summary compares funded and filled positions for the department as a whole, sourced from department payroll counts, without a division-by-division or unit-by-unit table available to the public.
That means a taxpayer, journalist, or researcher cannot currently determine New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing from published budget documents alone. There is no public figure for how many of the department's roughly 5,750 funded FY2025 positions work in collections, how many work in audit, or how many support the ANCHOR and Stay NJ property tax relief programs.
Closing this gap requires a direct records request to the Division of Taxation, asking for Collections and Enforcement unit staffing levels and a unit-level budget for fiscal years 2022 through 2025, along with any internal reorganization memos that might explain staffing shifts toward enforcement activity. That request remains open as a recommended follow-up to the original FOIA response and has not yet been submitted or answered.
The table below places the two datasets side by side for the same four fiscal years: department-wide staffing and budget from New Jersey's public budget documents, and the enforcement figures obtained directly from the Division of Taxation's public records response C255751. The two data sets come from different sources and different levels of the organization, so this comparison is presented for context only. It is not evidence that any specific increase in department staffing or spending caused any specific increase in enforcement activity.
Department-wide staffing and total appropriations rose in the same years that tax collection revenue rose and the Offer in Compromise acceptance rate fell. That is a timing pattern, not a causal link. The Office of Legislative Services attributes most of the department's added spending and headcount to property tax relief programs, which are administratively distinct from collections and enforcement. Confirming or ruling out a direct relationship between departmental resources and enforcement outcomes would require the New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing data described above, which has not yet been published or obtained.
No, New Jersey's public budget documents report staffing for the Department of the Treasury as a whole, which includes the Division of Taxation along with several other divisions. There is no publicly available breakdown that isolates Division of Taxation staffing, and no figure at all for its Collections and Enforcement unit. Getting that detail would require a separate public records request directed to the division.
The department's all-funds appropriation grew from about $4.22 billion in the FY2022 adjusted appropriation to about $7.06 billion in the FY2025 adjusted appropriation, an increase of roughly 67 percent. Most of that growth is tied to property tax relief programs, including ANCHOR, the Senior and Disabled Citizens' Property Tax Freeze, and the new Stay NJ Property Tax Credit Program, rather than tax collections operations.
Department-wide, filled positions rose from 5,171 in FY2022 to 5,649 in FY2025, and unfilled funded positions dropped from 312 to 105 over the same period. This shows the department hired more people and closed more vacancies each year, but the published data does not identify how many of those hires supported collections and enforcement specifically.
New Jersey's Governor's Budget and its companion legislative analysis report appropriations and staffing at the department level and by broad program category, not by internal operating unit. The Division of Taxation's Collections and Enforcement unit is one operating unit inside a much larger division, so its figures are folded into the department-wide totals rather than published on their own.
According to the Office of Legislative Services, the largest driver is direct property tax relief. The ANCHOR program alone grew to an estimated $2.28 billion in FY2025 as participation expanded toward two million households, and the Senior Freeze program grew after New Jersey raised its income limit and shortened its residency requirement. These property tax relief programs, not enforcement activity, account for most of the department's added spending.
Yes, a follow-up public records request specifically asking the Division of Taxation for Collections and Enforcement unit staffing levels and a unit-level budget for fiscal years 2022 through 2025 would produce the first real New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing figure. That request has been identified as a priority follow-up to the original public records response, but has not yet been submitted or answered.
The Governor's Budget, including the Budget in Brief and full Budget Detail, is published each year by the Department of the Treasury's Office of Management and Budget. The companion Office of Legislative Services Analysis of the New Jersey Budget for the Department of the Treasury is published by the New Jersey Legislature. Both are available as free downloads on their respective state websites.
The tax enforcement figures referenced here, including collections revenue and the Offer in Compromise acceptance rate, come from the New Jersey Department of the Treasury, Government Records Access Unit, public records response C255751, received June 2026. Those figures do not include staffing or budget data, which the division confirmed was not tracked in the form requested.
The staffing and budget figures come from a separate, independent public source: the Office of Legislative Services' Analysis of the New Jersey Budget for the Department of the Treasury, published in three editions covering the FY2022-2023, FY2024-2025, and FY2025-2026 budgets, cross-checked against the Governor's Budget Detail published by the Department of the Treasury's Office of Management and Budget.
Figures labeled "Adjusted Appropriation" reflect the amount budgeted for a fiscal year as of the date the corresponding analysis was published. Figures labeled "Expended" reflect actual spending reported once a fiscal year closes. Because department-wide figures are sometimes revised in later publications, the most recently published restatement was used wherever more than one figure was available for the same year.
These figures describe the entire Department of the Treasury, not the Division of Taxation alone, and not the New Jersey Division of Taxation collections staffing specifically. No division-level or unit-level staffing or budget breakdown is published by the State of New Jersey at this time.
Anyone who wants to review the source documents directly, verify a figure, or submit a follow-up request can contact the Department of the Treasury's Government Records Access Unit by mail, phone, or through the online public records request portal on the Treasury website. Requests should reference response C255751 for context and clearly state that the submission is asking for Collections and Enforcement unit staffing and budget data, since general Division of Taxation or department-wide requests will not surface that detail. Anyone filing a request is encouraged to schedule enough time for a response and to follow up in writing if the initial reply does not address unit-level figures.
Published based on data available as of July 2026. Figures may be revised in later state budget publications and updated if the Division of Taxation responds to a follow-up records request for unit-level staffing and budget data.