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

theregister.com

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

#161

Post by munk-a »

bomewish wrote: post #28
munk-a wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have worked recently to implement a self-hosted tax submission system and given their rate of return while there may be some mismanagement it is one of the most provably efficient organizations in the government netting 415$ for every dollar of funding in 2024.

Isn’t that a completely bizarre metric though in this instance??! It is specifically the revenue generating arm of the government. If it wasn’t running at a “surplus” that would be very concerning indeed.

Most law enforcement related entities end up being a money sink while enforcing our laws - the IRS actually runs a substantial profit while enforcing laws and additional funding would increase that funding. This also isn't a case like asset forfeiture where the money being collected is arguably unwarranted and shouldn't be taken from citizens. The IRS's "profit" ends up coming purely from catching people trying to commit fraud and enforcing the laws as written.

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

#162

Post by munk-a »

jdross wrote: post #46
munk-a wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have worked recently to implement a self-hosted tax submission system and given their rate of return while there may be some mismanagement it is one of the most provably efficient organizations in the government netting 415$ for every dollar of funding in 2024.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have an IRS, and I think IRS agents are probably one of the best ROI gov't employees possible, but 8,500 IT engineers and managers (who I have heard literally didn't even know how to code) makes no sense at all

I don't work in the IRS so I'm not certain what all of that is doing - but here we've got an organization that is highly efficient that's being targeted and downsized for political reasons. If we want to discuss wasteful government spending we need look no further than the DoD which still hasn't passed an internal audit for the past eight consecutive years. I don't know how the DoD is spending its money - that's fair, I'm just a rando... but the DoD doesn't know how the DoD is spending its money and that's purely absurd. The scales of budgets are also astronomically different - the DoD has a projected budget of 961 billion this year while the IRS has a projected budget of 11.9 billion - and that 11.9 billion ends up producing a large amount of excess revenue for the government.

I'm sure there's waste in the IRS - but these budget cuts are not being done in good faith.

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

#163

Post by munk-a »

akdev1l wrote: post #69
netsharc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reflex when people hear "complex" in this era: "Can we use AI for it?". Next month's headline: "IRS signs 200-million dollar deal with Grok to use AI to analyse tax returns, determine who gets audited".

You’re thinking too far behind. They can just use the AI to generate what your taxes would’ve been. Just have a script with “what are the taxes owed by $name” and print the output I’ll take $5M now and you can own 50% of my startup: GenTaxAI

Impossible - such a script would invalidate the need for Intuit and Intuit is critical for national security or something.

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

#164

Post by KPGv2 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #81
izacus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they're not, but this is how you smell someone that doesn't really want to enforce paying taxes, but just wants to evade them as much as possible. How quickly people show their colors.

I don't think that's fair. The US has so many administrative layers with taxing powers - federal, state, county, and municipal, and in many cases administrative bodies also charge massive filing fees, and courts charge large fees to finance themselves because they're consistently under-funded by legislatures. So Americans get taxed a lot at many different levels of activity. The cognitive load of having so many diffe…

> The cognitive load of having so many different points of taxation

What in the world. The cognitive load of just paying the bill that was automatically calculated by someone else?

FIT is like the only thing that should occupy your brain at all, and I agree that in a sane world it'd just be a tax imposed on us with no deductions or credits, meaning no one even has to think about it.

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

#165

Post by munk-a »

mvdtnz wrote: post #153
sokoloff wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already have another money printer that they’re perfectly happy to rely on, at least for the time being.

Which is...?

Inflation! Just use the money printer to print more money! Subsidy checks for everyone! Unexpected bonus checks for military personnel, brand new accounts for children with money that needs to be invested in an approved stock market index fund, throwing even more money at DHS and the DoD budgets!

How will we pay for it? Debt or printing money!

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

#166

Post by KPGv2 »

claytongulick wrote: post #139
munk-a wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumption taxes are almost always regressive and improperly place the majority of the tax burden on the poor - they're good to have (especially the sin taxes and tax discounts on specific encouraged behaviors) but they should be coupled with taxes on wealth (aka property) and income. And these taxes should be somewhat complex - just not to the extent we have today.

> they should be coupled with taxes on wealth (aka property) and income Why?

Because wealth is destructive to democracy. Anything destructive to democracy should be difficult to reify.

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

#167

Post by munk-a »

claytongulick wrote: post #139
munk-a wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumption taxes are almost always regressive and improperly place the majority of the tax burden on the poor - they're good to have (especially the sin taxes and tax discounts on specific encouraged behaviors) but they should be coupled with taxes on wealth (aka property) and income. And these taxes should be somewhat complex - just not to the extent we have today.

> they should be coupled with taxes on wealth (aka property) and income Why?

To better spread the tax burden. In an idealized system taxes would be levied in such a manner where a good contribution of labor allowed a more comfortable lifestyle that scaled with diminishing returns. All people should be guaranteed a baseline of comfort and additional economic productivity would offer access to additional luxuries at a gradual rate. That kind of level of micromanagement is only do-able in a command economy which is terrible for a bunch of reasons I won't go into but our tax system should work to ensure that the poorest of us have access to a baseline of benefits at the expense of the richest. Wealth and income should be taxed since income is the most direct expression of productivity and wealth is an accumulation of unspent excess. I don't mean to lean too hard into utilitarianism because it got culty and BS over time but there is a diminishing return to luxuries and we can ensure more joy in society by trying to even the distribution of services.

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

#168

Post by CamperBob2 »

orphea wrote: post #159
CamperBob2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the current rate of progress, that is a reasonable thing to expect. But I'd say give it two to three years, myself. This kind of wholesale paradigm shift tends to take longer than you think it will, and then, once it happens, it tends to happen faster than you think it will. Except for things like hardware drivers, most of the code that will ever need to be written already has been. It will just need to be refacto…

I have plenty of reasons to think it's not going to happen. Not with the LLM-based generation of AI. So let's just agree to disagree :-)

What are some of your reasons? The usual ones don't seem to be holding up well but I'm interested in new insights, certainly. Obviously you disagree with your manager, but that could be due to any number of things.

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

#169

Post by cdrnsf »

jdross wrote: post #52
cdrnsf wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the private sector is how the US has arrived at a miserable, unworkable healthcare system and an out of control carceral system.

Is there a single private sector more removed from market incentives than healthcare?

I loved it when I got an $80k bill because the provider was playing chicken with insurance. It's a terrible system.

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

#170

Post by guywithahat »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #59
guywithahat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's a retort on the 2022 IRA bill, which increased the IRS budget by 80 billion over 10 years, and paved the way to hire 87,000 people. There has been a lot of hiring recently so it's hard to tell one thing from another but this isn't so much of mass layoff as an attempt at returning to normal.

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).

We had an exceptional increase in funding, followed by an attempt to curb that increase in funding. The size of the IRS is not just a financial exercise but a moral one, and I believe the prior budget increases as part of the 2022 IRA provides important context to staffing in the IRS.
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