IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
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Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
#2[deleted]
Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
#3The thing that makes me nervous is the statement that they plan to use AI. AI? The thing that is mathematically incapable of perfection, on finance information, for which perfection is table stakes? Not to mention all the privacy issues (although that boat has sailed).
Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
#4I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.
Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
#5Starve the beast in action. The less employees the IRS has, the lower the chance there are enough staff on hand to audit the truly uber rich properly.
Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
#6I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.
An LLM may take the interesting parts of my job but the parts that suck (dealing with people) will never be taken over by an LLM.
Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
#7I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.
Unfortunately the big players are pretty entrenched so the degraded quality that appears once AI fails to replace laid off workers will have minimal impact on their bottom line. And the bar for government is literally as low as "Is this such bad UX that it will cause a revolution?".
So why would they care whether its Covid, AI or a Recession that gives them the excuse to do less and less. The system keeps on rolling, the rich get richer, normal peoples lives get incrementally shittier.
Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
#8The thing that makes me nervous is the statement that they plan to use AI. AI? The thing that is mathematically incapable of perfection, on finance information, for which perfection is table stakes? Not to mention all the privacy issues (although that boat has sailed).
I am not following, a lot of things get turned into python calculations, so the LLM is not doing the precise math.
Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
#9Defunding the IRS is nothing but an effort to reduce tax enforcement. People that have relatively straightforward finances can be trivially audited in a formulaic way with data that's on hand - a lack of human auditing resources tends to benefit those with more complex finances which also tend to be the people with a lot of money who can afford to lobby for less enforcement funding.
Also for reference, in 2024 the IRS had a rate of return of 415:1, they'll obviously target the lowest hanging fruit first but for every dollar of funding received they collected 415 dollars of tax revenue that would have been missed. This is an obscenely efficient organization.
Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
#10If you're not asking, "how many of these people did nothing?" you've never worked in the public sector.