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Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

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Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#141

Post by chrisco255 »

b112 wrote: post #100
chrisco255 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better strategy would be to do away with income tax altogether and replace with something easier to comply with and enforce like a Federal sales tax. States that run on sales tax alone need only to collect revenue from businesses, which shrinks their staffing requirements. And since it's a straightforward % of sales, it's easier to audit as well.

I have no issue with billionaires, and don't resent their cash. But if you drop all income tax, and do only sales tax you'd miss a lot of their income. Same for the moderately wealthy too. I suspect you'd need 100% or even 200% sales tax to capture what you so now. That's going to lead to black markets, reduced economic output, etc too.

What? 100% sales tax? No. 20-30% would do just fine. People have already run the numbers on this. Black markets already exist for under-the-table labor (tens of millions of illegal immigrants don't pay income tax). It's actually much harder to run a black market retail establishment as it requires public collusion and cash-based sales.

The economic output would increase as compliance costs would be reduced. Furthermore, you could roll forward investments without needing to pay income tax, so that would lead to a compounding effect on economic output.

Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#142

Post by junar »

jmholla wrote: post #77

I reached out to them to send a letter to my old employer to correct my W2. I did talk to someone, but that letter never got sent. Still need to sort out my taxes on that front.

You can read the instructions for Form 4852 to see if you can use it to file your return.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f4852.pdf

Note that in some cases, your employer should not issue a corrected Form W-2. Make sure you understand in which situations a corrected Form W-2 is needed.

Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#143

Post by loco5niner »

sandwitches wrote: post #126
anon291 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an American citizen, just call your US representative. They will have you on the phone with an actual person at the IRS in a day or two. Literally, I've learned this lesson the hard way. The moment I have to wait more than an hour or so to figure out a government service or agency, I immediately lodge a formal complaint with my representative. They have a large staff dedicated to constituent services, and…

I shouldn't have to explain why this isn't a viable long-term solution, right?

Why not? Things get escalated to one superior, then the next, then the next, until finally someone who can take care of the problem. Of course, going from the lowest level directly to the highest level is a bad idea, but there is some middle ground.

Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#144

Post by idontwantthis »

junar wrote: post #139
idontwantthis wrote: post #87

My story; Around 3 years ago I sent in the form to get a tax return duplicate and the required $43 check. They deposited the check and never sent me the return. I never reached anyone on the phone. I eventually resolved the dispute I was having with other documentation. IRS owes me $43.

For future reference, you can get a tax return transcript from the IRS online, for free. https://www.irs.gov/individuals/get-transcript If whoever you were dealing with was refusing to accept a transcript, perhaps it would be good to name and shame them.

I needed the address and that doesn’t show it fully. But I’ll still shame the District of Columbia tax department. Truly mean people working on the phones there.

Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#145

Post by throwaway48476 »

lostdog wrote: post #43
cchance wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure cutting 20 BILLION in funding from them in the IRA isn't going to fuck over any of their internal processes or hiring

The IRA started out adding $80b to IRS funding, and Republicans negotiated it down to $60b.

As I recall the Republicans tried to add an ammendment that the $60b would only be used to target >$400k income but the democrats rejected it.

Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#146

Post by bpodgursky »

kube-system wrote: post #127
bpodgursky wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is not trained to "escalate" an issue because there's nobody to escalate to. You can get this to happen pretty reliably via prompting, and with even light retraining basically 100%. And here's the thing: most front-line customer service is also clueless about difficult problems. The IRS cannot pull 10,000 seasonal experts on the line, they are going to hire barely-trained part-time accountants who also flub h…

But human brains have a more developed and reliable means of expressing uncertainty, which is still a challenge for LLMs. e.g. part-time front-line customer service will prefix a statement with "uhhh..." if they don't actually know what they're talking about, even if they do have trouble answering accurately.

> e.g. part-time front-line customer service will prefix a statement with "uhhh..." if they don't actually know what they're talking about, even if they do have trouble answering accurately

You can literally prompt GPT4 "Prefix a statement with uhhhh if you don't know what you are talking about" and get similar behavior.

Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#147

Post by kube-system »

bpodgursky wrote: post #146
kube-system wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But human brains have a more developed and reliable means of expressing uncertainty, which is still a challenge for LLMs. e.g. part-time front-line customer service will prefix a statement with "uhhh..." if they don't actually know what they're talking about, even if they do have trouble answering accurately.

> e.g. part-time front-line customer service will prefix a statement with "uhhh..." if they don't actually know what they're talking about, even if they do have trouble answering accurately You can literally prompt GPT4 "Prefix a statement with uhhhh if you don't know what you are talking about" and get similar behavior.

That doesn't mean the 'uhhh...' is related to the certainty of the remainder of the response.

I literally just tested your prompt, with the question "is the sky blue?" and chatgpt prefixed the response with "uhhh..."

These models create the illusion of thought by statistically stringing words together, but they don't actually think or perform judgement of their own.

Edit: After digging into this for a few minutes, I challenge you to try prompting an LLM to judge the certainty of its own responses. The results I am getting are even worse than I thought it would be.

Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#148

Post by jfyi »

anon291 wrote: post #74
gmd63 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's thinking inside the box of extremely low-effort propaganda. The IRS is critical to stopping fraud and making sure everyone plays by the rules. Currently, we have folks not respecting the rules and getting more economic influence than they deserve. The current climate is an effective tax on honesty. As long as budget increases to the IRS increase revenue to the government, they should keep growing. If you take…

> As long as budget increases to the IRS increase revenue to the government, they should keep growing. Why? The government is not a business. They should not be interested in 'raising revenue'. They should be interested in helping their constituents grow rich; not taking their wealth.

I agree that the government shouldn't need to be interested in 'raising revenue'.

It does however have to deal with malicious actors who ham-handedly try to game the system at everyone else's expense while patting themselves on the back for being clever. Man, if we could just fix this one thing, think of all the general operating costs that could be cut everywhere.

Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#149

Post by ghaff »

pembrook wrote: post #137
enragedcacti wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) It has. 2) Tax enforcement is a cat and mouse game, efficiency from automatic data collection could be offset by any number of things like changes to the tax code or more advanced methods for tax evasion. 3) Efficiency relative to the 1980s is way less important than the efficiency of each marginal dollar. Refusing to fund the IRS over its efficiency is like skipping work because you need to find a faster route to…

I know big company/government types often (incorrectly) conflate "size of budget" with "amount of work being done." But this disincentivizes productivity and is a sign of a broken system of endlessly expanding do-nothing bureaucracy. The budget for [insert government agency] should never being growing steadily with population growth + inflation, assuming similar scope of work. This would mean government is wholly inc…

Not saying that opportunities for large-scale tax evasion don't exist--and you may disagree with policies at both the individual and corporate level that enable tax-avoidance--but the opportunities for people who are properly classified as the the 1%s or at least the top few percenters mostly don't exist without really going outside the law.

Re: Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

#150

Post by anon291 »

sandwitches wrote: post #126
anon291 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are an American citizen, just call your US representative. They will have you on the phone with an actual person at the IRS in a day or two. Literally, I've learned this lesson the hard way. The moment I have to wait more than an hour or so to figure out a government service or agency, I immediately lodge a formal complaint with my representative. They have a large staff dedicated to constituent services, and…

I shouldn't have to explain why this isn't a viable long-term solution, right?

So historically, all business with the feds were done via your representative. It's fairly new that there's a bureaucracy for everything.
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