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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

#71

Post by iranintoavan »

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.

I did no verification on whether that metric is correct or not, but I would suspect the metric would be only measuring the amount of revenue the IRS "generated" from doing manual work like audits. The regular, I owe 1,000 in taxes, and I paid 1,000 in taxes. Wouldn't be considered +1,000 in that case, it would be excluded from the metric altogether. Only the additional "findings" from audits would be counted.

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

#72

Post by justinator »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #45
justinator wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

I don't think this is the current administration to fix the IRS, given the whole Social Security scam SNAFU.

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

#74

Post by monkaiju »

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.

Everyday I am more and more pleased with our company's (or at least our company's tech department) to effectively ban AI.

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

#76

Post by Freedom2 »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #26
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.

Phone and chat support has already happened, robotic law enforcement is the future. Now pick up that can citizen.

Notably that isn't an accurate reference. The Combine officer is not a robot, so no robotic law enforcement happened.

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

#77

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #49
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

‘We know you’re trying to survive in your low income, but we want to extract more money from you so the billionaires don’t have to pay as much tax’

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

#78

Post by XorNot »

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.

No the point is that if the IRS was at maximum efficiency, more funding wouldn't increase revenues because tax law is tax law: you can't market it or expand the customer base.

But if every new dollar currently produces much more then a dollar in returns, it means it's underfunded because taxes that should be collected, that by legal analysis would be planned for in budgeting, aren't.

And that matters for a great many things, but one reason is that if you pay taxes and want a tax cut then one reason you're not getting it is because actual revenues are lower then they should be due to uncollected taxes.

AKA tax fraud steals from the honest tax payer.

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

#79

Post by hvb2 »

sleepybrett wrote: post #39
throw0101a wrote: post #22

Consist strategy in hampering income: > "Starve the beast" is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending[1][2][3] by cutting taxes, to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending. The term "the beast", in this context, refers to the United States federal government and the programs it funds, primarily with American tax money…

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

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

#80

Post by rtkwe »

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]

Ok what about for the people that mainly earn their living not from an income paid by a job; ie the richest people in the country?
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