IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup • Hacker News Board

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#111

Post by bcrosby95 » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

PieTime wrote: post #96

dheera wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The United States has a federal system That doesn't prevent there being a single point of collection and distribution.

You’re absolutely correct. For income taxes many states and the federal government offset each others debts. In Canada provinces can choose to harmonize taxes or collect independently.

Which misses the point. If the point is to reduce the number of taxes, having the federal government collect 10 different types of taxes instead of state governments collecting 7 types of taxes won't change all the different taxes we have.

There is no singular place we can change how many different taxes you pay. There's... thousands? Tens of thousands? Once you factor in city, county, state, federal, special districts, etc.

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#112

Post by jandrewrogers » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #9

Defunding 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 IR…

That “415:1” is misleading and manipulative. The target rate of recovery is ~10:1, which is roughly what the IRS actually achieves.

Audits are not an infinite money glitch. I used to work for a Federal audit agency that also recovered ~10:1. The reason we target 10:1 recovery on audits is because the return on funding additional audits beyond that falls off very sharply. Furthermore, more aggressive auditing greatly increases compliance costs which ultimately come back as costs to the Federal government, so the net recovered revenue is even less than the headline figure.

Audit recoveries tend to be about sloppy compliance, not people trying to cheat the system. People with more complex taxes are more likely to screw up the exponentially more complex compliance aspects. Auditors are mostly fighting entropy.

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#113

Post by senordevnyc » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

vhiremath4 wrote: post #99

ertg5g5y wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your good friend Sam is hanging out with a shitty crowd... read the site for yourself. https://dogetrack.info/people/enabler-staff#sam-corcos

I am on the same site. It’s trash and doesn’t even come close to detailing the internal dynamics. People have no idea what’s actually going on inside, but I guess it’s simpler to just be upset and take sides. There are people associated with DOGE (Sam included) who are tirelessly doing unsexy and thankless work while not being sensational like Trump or Elon. But they still get trampled on by people who simply want to…

Yeah, when you associate with liars, con artists, criminals, and pedophiles in their attempts to dismantle our democracy for their own personal gain, people are unlikely to thank you for your hard work. Your friend can go fuck himself.

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#114

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #97

toomuchtodo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide evidence for what you considered to be normal to be an effective workforce for the ongoing task at hand (nation state tax collection).

The evidence was the baseline before the increase

The baseline was there was significant tax evasion by high net worth individuals. The staff up was to counter that, staffing down puts us back at reduced enforcement.

Someone has to pay to operate a nation state, you can’t borrow forever to fill the gap and there’s nothing left to cut. Roughly the bottom 60% of Americans do not make enough to have a federal income tax liability. So, we can kick the can on the top 40% paying until the bond vigilantes make the decision for the US.

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#115

Post by rkeene2 » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #23

munk-a wrote: post #9

Defunding 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 IR…

[flagged]

This misses the point that tax exemptions are the way politicians campaign for voter blocks. Having different kinds of taxes makes it easier to target a voter blocks more precisely.

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#116

Post by jcranmer » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

mothballed wrote: post #17

mschuster91 wrote: post #5

Starve 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.

The low income (under 25k) with EITC, were the largest audited group with 298,485 of 626,204 audits performed in 2022. The rest of those earning under 200k had 250,391 audits.[] 48% of audits were under 25k income. 87% of audits were people under 200k income. Kind of interferes with the idea these audits were all about going after the uber rich. They were way more about going after the poor than they were about going…

The audits of people under that are going to fall under 2 or 3 categories:

a) People who filled in the wrong number on the spreadsheet that is taxes for whatever reason, and the audit is informing the filer that they filled it out incorrectly. I mean, really, taxes should start with the government sending me the form of what it thinks I owe and I should be making corrections to that, since the government already has this information and has done it, and that would make many of these audits go away.

b) People who misunderstood eligibility requirements and claimed deductions they weren't entitled to.

c) So I don't know how these people are counted, but there are absolutely millionaires and billionaires out there cheating on their taxes and claiming no income (e.g., the current president). It's totally plausible that they get listed in the "under 25k income" audit section despite the fact that they are in fact the uber-rich that is the intended target of the outrage.

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#117

Post by jmyeet » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

Remember when the Biden administration massively increased IRS funding and the Right collectively lost their minds? They fairly successfully pushed the idea that these agents were going to go after average citizens. They never were and you're way too gullible if you ever believed that.

Every $1 spent on the IRS returns roughly $12 in revenue [1]. This revenue doesn't come from W2 employees. It comes from exposing tax fraud from complicated tax schemes used by the very wealthy and corporations. That's why the Right lost their minds about it.

The idea that you save money by cutting IRS funding in the budget is just so laughably false that I'm surprised anybody believes it.

[1]: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/revenue-and-distribution...

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#118

Post by conductr » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

stephen_cagle wrote: post #57

munk-a wrote: post #9

Defunding 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 IR…

Is that 415:1 the rate of return of an audit, or the expense:revenue ratio of the IRS as a whole? I remember hearing some time ago that the expense ratio was 11% for the IRS? But 415:1 is way way less than 11%.

Captured revenue : cost to capture (could be an audit, billing for interest/fees due, etc. lots of avenues to capture revenue that is being missed).

The problem is these metrics aren't really scalable productivity metrics. If you doubled cost, it might go to 100:1, if you tripled cost, it might go to 0.5:1

Each dollar generally gets more expensive to capture.

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#119

Post by conductr » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #109

AdamH12113 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that. I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of t…

I... don't understand how that excuses complexity? what stops "local governments" from applying same type of tax as higher levels? why would they need taxes specific for them?

I tend to agree with this. The logic should be the same with different rate tables for each taxing body. What I don't want though is the Fed govt being the collector and distributor of all the funds. They already weld too much power with their various funding influences for transportation, healthcare, etc. The states and local govts shouldn't need to pander so heavily to the federal govt for funds.

Re: IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

#120

Post by mothballed » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 10:22 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #116

mothballed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low income (under 25k) with EITC, were the largest audited group with 298,485 of 626,204 audits performed in 2022. The rest of those earning under 200k had 250,391 audits.[] 48% of audits were under 25k income. 87% of audits were people under 200k income. Kind of interferes with the idea these audits were all about going after the uber rich. They were way more about going after the poor than they were about going…

The audits of people under that are going to fall under 2 or 3 categories: a) People who filled in the wrong number on the spreadsheet that is taxes for whatever reason, and the audit is informing the filer that they filled it out incorrectly. I mean, really, taxes should start with the government sending me the form of what it thinks I owe and I should be making corrections to that, since the government already has…

>c) So I don't know how these people are counted, but there are absolutely millionaires and billionaires out there cheating on their taxes and claiming no income (e.g., the current president). It's totally plausible that they get listed in the "under 25k income" audit section despite the fact that they are in fact the uber-rich that is the intended target of the outrage.

There's a sleight of hand in your argument here. I said under 25k with EITC. You can't get EITC if you're "claiming no income." That's why it's called earned income tax credit as the credit is intended to help offset welfare cliffs as you start to earn more money but at low incomes. So your whole paragraph here about (As an aside, if someone actually thinks earns nothing and doesn't want EITC which they can't get anyway with zero income they probably won't even be filing, there is no "return" to audit.)