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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

#171

Post by guywithahat »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #150
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can provide evidence that the IRS and the majority of its employees have good relationships with democrats. The equivalent question is can you provide proof that ICE provides power and is loyal to Trump? I don’t think you would say that’s a deep state conspiracy.

OP talks about policing high net-worth individuals and organizations, causing most of the taxation headaches. You’re shifting the discussion to organizations being political, hoping it becomes a divisive topic. A well-worn and sleazy playbook to dodge any discussion of a problem that has exceeded the tipping point.

I'm not the guy you replied to but the idea that "high-net worth individuals" (I assume you mean hundred-millionaires+) are skimping out on a meaningful amount of taxes is political. Most of these IRS agents will end up going after normal people, which is where most tax revenue comes from and where most of the fraud is. Billionaires have entire teams who do nothing but make sure their taxes are in order, a small business owner is more liable to make mistakes or try to commit fraud, which is who they will have to go after if they want to increase revenue. I think there's merit to his point, that the IRS has a history of targeting conservative organizations (https://grokipedia.com/page/IRS_targeting_controversy), and this has lead to their funding being a political issue.

I wouldn't call is comment sleazy I think he's just trying to discuss the topic at hand.

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

#172

Post by nobodyandproud »

guywithahat wrote: post #171
nobodyandproud wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP talks about policing high net-worth individuals and organizations, causing most of the taxation headaches. You’re shifting the discussion to organizations being political, hoping it becomes a divisive topic. A well-worn and sleazy playbook to dodge any discussion of a problem that has exceeded the tipping point.

I'm not the guy you replied to but the idea that "high-net worth individuals" (I assume you mean hundred-millionaires+) are skimping out on a meaningful amount of taxes is political. Most of these IRS agents will end up going after normal people, which is where most tax revenue comes from and where most of the fraud is. Billionaires have entire teams who do nothing but make sure their taxes are in order, a small busi…

> Most of these IRS agents will end up going after normal people,

Normal people are the easiest to chase; the cut backs have made this a foregone conclusion.

> which is where most tax revenue comes

Because normal people can’t afford transnational accounting shenanigans.

> from and where most of the fraud is.

The Panama papers prove deliberate tax dodges are not by “normal people”.

> I wouldn't call is comment sleazy I think he's just trying to discuss the topic at hand.

Injecting and steering a discussion towards party and identity politics a where there was none is a sure fire way to shutdown a discourse.

Deliberate or not, the method involved is sleazy.

By the way: Given that your definition of normal in your heavily downvoted comment, I’m not surprised you’re defending the comment.

Dig deeper and look back over decades. The 2022 bill and headcount to 100k was a push BACK to normal.

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

#173

Post by nobodyandproud »

guywithahat wrote: post #42
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…

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.

Normal?

The 100k headcount and bill doesn’t cover what we in the US used to enjoy, with a smaller population: - https://taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/2025-04/IRS%...

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/5856e771-dd09-4517-...

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

#174

Post by nobodyandproud »

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).

I think we should first agree on what “normal” means.

I personally view our IRS head count as being at historical lows by raw headcount; and even lower by population size if we look at the last 40 years (would love data that goes back further).

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

#175

Post by dragonwriter »

AdamH12113 wrote: post #156
dragonwriter wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's theoretically possible for a local government to levy an income tax, “Theoretically possible” in that thousands of local jurisdictions, among about 1/3 of US states, already do either income or payroll taxes or both.

Fair enough. I was thinking of local governments unilaterally deciding to impose income taxes. The impression I got was that existing local income taxes are effectively state funding for municipalities collected and distributed by state governments, which doesn't seem like quite the same thing, but perhaps I'm splitting hairs.

Existing local income taxes are imposed by local authorities. Because states (unlike the federal government) have general police powers, there generally must be authority for the local agency to do so in state law, but this is not the same as state taxes which are redistributed to local governments (which also exist.) Some states include in their laws allowing local jurisdictions to impose income taxes provisions for collection and distribution to the taxing authority by the state tax agency alongside state income taxes, to avoid the expense of duplicated administrative function, but I don't see how that changes the essential local character of the tax.

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

#176

Post by anigbrowl »

KPGv2 wrote: post #164
anigbrowl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A simple example would be how the prices displayed in stores aren't inclusive of tax. So if you're grocery shopping, you've got to keep recalculating the tax as you go to know your total in advance. For anyone on a tight budget, that sales tax impacts their buying decisions and mistakes could be costly. Property or income tax liability can also involve a lot of effort to calculate correctly.

If you're never had to worry about this, congratulations! But for many others its an extra level of stress and complexity that they'd prefer to minimize.

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

#178

Post by JohnTHaller »

xenadu02 wrote: post #146
AtheistOfFail wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. Uber Eats now makes you talk to an AI bot among other customer-hostile issues. I've largely abandoned them. The last straw was a driver leaving the food at some random house I could not even identify from the picture. It made me wait 5 minutes before I could do anything at all. Then it made me talk to a bot. When I eventually got it to issue a refund I realized they kept the service fees and driver tip. For a…

Order directly from the restaurant. You'll get better and faster service. And it'll often be cheaper as they have to increase the price on middle men platforms to pay for the fees.

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

#179

Post by claytongulick »

munk-a wrote: post #167
claytongulick wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 comm…

So, in your opinion, people have a right the the results of someone else's labor?

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

#180

Post by sleepybrett »

hvb2 wrote: post #79
sleepybrett wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope when someone else owns the whole government the beast becomes the us military.

Nah, it won't because ANY cuts to DoD will be met with "Don't you support our troops" Which is completely unrelated but it works very well as an attack line

I do support our troops, i would just like to support less of them.
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