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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

#51

Post by izacus »

KPGv2 wrote: post #41
dheera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

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.

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

#52

Post by jdross »

cdrnsf wrote: post #43
tokyobreakfast wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#53

Post by cake_robot »

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 point of prior recent investments in tax police (that the GOP worked to claw back) was specifically to enable the enforcement of complex cases (rich people) that they didn't have the bandwidth to engage.

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

#54

Post by astura »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #18
watwut wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this have anything to do with AI push? It is fairly straightforward that billionaire class cooperating with Trump admin dont want to pay taxes. Republicans want IRS incapable so that tax fraud flourish. Bonus point is that they will be able to pretend worry about it with minorities.

> Republicans want IRS incapable so that tax fraud flourish. That's wildly hyperbolic.

It's not hyperbolic, it's factual.

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

#55

Post by newswasboring »

kerblang wrote: post #4

I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.

The part I don't understand is why can't they wait for the efficiency gains to materialize before firing people? Better pay a few people for a few months extra than be wrong. If AI is going to bring in all this efficiency, this would be peanuts.

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

#56

Post by kerblang »

watwut wrote: post #13
kerblang wrote: post #4

I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.

Does this have anything to do with AI push? It is fairly straightforward that billionaire class cooperating with Trump admin dont want to pay taxes. Republicans want IRS incapable so that tax fraud flourish. Bonus point is that they will be able to pretend worry about it with minorities.

> Naturally, AI is expected to play a significant role in all this, making people better at their jobs and more end-user-focused, he said.

> However, Pandya said IRS leaders are telling employees that AI won't endanger their jobs.

Not much of trump supporter myself, but I check HN for tech news rather than politics

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

#57

Post by stephen_cagle »

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%.

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

#58

Post by righthand »

jdross wrote: post #44
arcologies1985 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The tax code is complex and Direct File isnt the only IRS digital service. It was built by F18 and USDS. You should inform yourself instead of being hysterical about numbers. If you inform yourself the numbers aren’t so scary.

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

#59

Post by toomuchtodo »

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.

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).

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

#60

Post by netsharc »

munk-a wrote: post #14
Traster wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implied in your statement - it benefits those who can create more complex financial situations. Often the complexity of the situation is largely synthetic.

I agree that the complex financials are generally intentionally created for sheltering and that complexity is only possible because of our overly complex tax code which has been made significantly more complex by tax preparer lobbyists from Intuit and others.

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".

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