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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

#41

Post by KPGv2 »

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]

> Get rid of sales tax, property tax

The very first things you list aren't related to the IRS at all. They're local and state taxes, and to get rid of those would require a radical rewriting of the Constitution itself. Not to mention it would destroy all fire department, county hospital, school, city park, state park, etc. funding.

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

#42

Post by guywithahat »

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.

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

#43

Post by cdrnsf »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #16
jdross wrote: post #11

8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane. They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work

The public sector is where you need 12 people (and a project manager) to build an Access database.

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

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

#44

Post by jdross »

arcologies1985 wrote: post #32
jdross wrote: post #11

8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane. They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work

They built IRS Direct File which was a huge improvement. Then the administration killed it to serve tax prep companies.

Do you know how many people 8,500 employees in IT alone is? Google, all of it, has 60,000 engineers

IRS direct file is just not that complex, I promise you, and are you sure it was even built in house vs contracted?

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

#45

Post by IncreasePosts »

justinator wrote: post #34
IncreasePosts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that many millions of those "customers" need to hire a professional for hundreds/thousands of dollars to properly interact with the IRS.

That's not the IT department's problem. Well, they'll get blamed, but that's pretty on-brand for IT departments.

It's not the IT department's fault, but it makes one wonder if the IT department needs to actually be that large, since customers need to do so much on their own.

Per capita the UK has 2.5x the IT workers in tax collection compared to the US (~25 IT per million vs 65 IT per million). But, those tax collection IT workers help create a system which means UK citizens don't spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year just to file their taxes.

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

#46

Post by jdross »

munk-a wrote: post #21
jdross wrote: post #11

8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane. They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work

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

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

#48

Post by justin66 »

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…

It's super weird to believe auditing a normal person and auditing "the uber rich" is in any way comparable. In both cases the thing being done can be referred to as an "audit," but that's it.

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

#49

Post by OkayPhysicist »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #29
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…

How many of those <25k audits were completely automated? Going after the poor with an automated script at scale is basically free money for a government without compassion.

It's not "going after" the poor. You have to be out-right negligent to end up with any penalty at all, and the penalties involved are relatively small (20% of how much extra you owed them anyway). The vast majority of these low-income audits consist of "hey, we know you made money X, you didn't report it on your taxes. Fix it".

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

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]

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