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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

#91

Post by claytongulick »

yibg wrote: post #84
dheera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

IIRC, this was one of the main arguments for the Articles of Confederacy, the states were pretty nervous about this exact situation.

This was reaffirmed by Marshall [1] with the famous “the power to tax involves the power to destroy."

[1] https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/mcculloch-v-mar...

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

#92

Post by trelane »

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".

Cheating on tax credits also comes to mind

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

#93

Post by rmah »

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.

Because, for white collar jobs, that is so rare that it's reasonable to say that it never happens.

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

#95

Post by oarla »

netsharc wrote: post #60
munk-a wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I suspect something like this may already be in place.

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

#96

Post by PieTime »

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.

You’re absolutely correct. For income taxes many states and the federal government offset each others debts.

In Canada provinces can choose to harmonize taxes or collect independently.

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

#97

Post by groundzeros2015 »

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).

The evidence was the baseline before the increase

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

#98

Post by selectodude »

ertg5g5y wrote: post #88
vhiremath4 wrote: post #47

[flagged]

Your good friend Sam is hanging out with a shitty crowd... read the site for yourself. https://dogetrack.info/people/enabler-staff#sam-corcos

Vinay Hiremath has a blog post titled “I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life” so I’ll be charitable and say he’s willfully ignorant about what’s going on.

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

#99

Post by vhiremath4 »

ertg5g5y wrote: post #88
vhiremath4 wrote: post #47

[flagged]

Your good friend Sam is hanging out with a shitty crowd... read the site for yourself. https://dogetrack.info/people/enabler-staff#sam-corcos

I am on the same site. It’s trash and doesn’t even come close to detailing the internal dynamics.

People have no idea what’s actually going on inside, but I guess it’s simpler to just be upset and take sides. There are people associated with DOGE (Sam included) who are tirelessly doing unsexy and thankless work while not being sensational like Trump or Elon. But they still get trampled on by people who simply want to be upset and ignorant.

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

#100

Post by DSMan195276 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #37
dheera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why would you simplify the tax code if the whole point of the tax code is to create loopholes so you can pay way less taxes than the public would vote for? The tax code exists for Welfare Queen Billionaires like Elon Musk.

Well see, you actually missed the catch that by eliminating everything except income tax people like Elon wouldn't have to pay any tax, it's even better for them. He's not getting a W-2, virtually all of his income is actually capital gains or similar.
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