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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

#81

Post by anigbrowl »

izacus wrote: post #51
KPGv2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 different points of taxation is annoying and exhausting to a lot of people. It makes household budgeting a lot more work than it really needs to be.

But it is this way because of the Constitution

They maybe we should change that and have a simpler system with much less complexity. Dismissing people who object to the painful complexity of the US tax regime as 'evaders' is npt insightful or helpful.

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

newswasboring wrote: post #55
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.

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by yibg »

Traster wrote: post #12
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…

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

In both cases though, mostly rich people.

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

#84

Post by yibg »

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]

Taxes aren't just there to provide an income stream to the government. It's also a mechanism to guide behavior via incentives (or punishment). Right or wrong there we're providing an incentive to hold assets longer, or use less fuel or buy from domestic producers etc.

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

#85

Post by dheera »

AdamH12113 wrote: post #35
dheera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that. I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of t…

> The United States has a federal system

That doesn't prevent there being a single point of collection and distribution.

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

#86

Post by rtkwe »

bpodgursky wrote: post #38
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #3

The thing that makes me nervous is the statement that they plan to use AI. AI? The thing that is mathematically incapable of perfection, on finance information, for which perfection is table stakes? Not to mention all the privacy issues (although that boat has sailed).

If you think the state of the average tax return is "perfection as table stakes"..... you might be disappointed.

Most tax returns these days are prepared and submitted electronically so the basic work of the arithmetic involved should be as close as possible to perfect already. Evaluating that is going to be pretty mathematically intensive though and LLMs have been pretty bad at that. Tool usage has gotten it better so maybe they'll just hand off the validation to the existing traditional computing and mostly be vibes based, 'does this return look legit?' evaluation.

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

#89

Post by rdtsc »

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.

> 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.

Managers' manager convinced them they should expect an AI Miracle. Now your job is to put on a show to pretend to create an AI Miracle so your manager and their manager can pat themselves on the back.

Under enough pressure to use AI people will just produce code as before but LLM-ize it with more comments and verbose crap to look like AI did it. "See boss, I am using AI, so happy you got us this tool".

However, if you do it too well the next step will be "we don't really need so and so, we'll just replace them with an AI agent since it was working out so well".

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

#90

Post by rmah »

dheera wrote: post #85
AdamH12113 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that. I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of t…

> The United States has a federal system That doesn't prevent there being a single point of collection and distribution.

It sorta does, that's one of the primary points of a federal system.
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