[HN Gopher] IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'ef...
___________________________________________________________________
IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency'
shakeup
Author : freitasm
Score : 201 points
Date : 2026-02-19 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| 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).
| rileymat2 wrote:
| I am not following, a lot of things get turned into python
| calculations, so the LLM is not doing the precise math.
| cael450 wrote:
| The people in charge have a pathological hatred for the IRS. AI
| is just an excuse to continue destroying the capabilities of
| the IRS. In the meantime, they'll keep borrowing to fund the
| government while telling everyone it's ok because they slashed
| programs that make up a tiny portion of the budget. This can go
| on until there is a major economic shock related to US debt,
| but honestly, most of them will be dead by the time that
| happens.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| If you think the state of the average tax return is "perfection
| as table stakes"..... you might be disappointed.
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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.
| Nition wrote:
| I thought I would give the Treasury the benefit of the doubt
| for a moment and check whether they meant LLMs like we're all
| assuming, or possibly a more specific finance-focused type of
| AI. Like how we have specialist neural net AI helping with
| radiology.
|
| Looking at their official info document[1]... "a secure AI-
| based chat solution"... "AI-assisted code development"...
|
| Okay they mean LLMs, carry on.
|
| [1] https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury-AI-
| Strat...
| kerblang wrote:
| 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.
| AtheistOfFail wrote:
| 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.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Phone and chat support has already happened, robotic law
| enforcement is the future. Now pick up that can citizen.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Notably that isn't an accurate reference. The Combine
| officer is not a robot, so no robotic law enforcement
| happened.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Unfortunately the big players are pretty entrenched so the
| degraded quality that appears once AI fails to replace laid off
| workers will have minimal impact on their bottom line. And the
| bar for government is literally as low as "Is this such bad UX
| that it will cause a revolution?".
|
| So why would they care whether its Covid, AI or a Recession
| that gives them the excuse to do less and less. The system
| keeps on rolling, the rich get richer, normal peoples lives get
| incrementally shittier.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| > Republicans want IRS incapable so that tax fraud flourish.
|
| That's wildly hyperbolic.
| selectodude wrote:
| They literally put a tax cheat as head of the IRS last
| year.
|
| People considering speaking frankly about reality as
| hyperbolic is how we got here.
| astura wrote:
| It's not hyperbolic, it's factual.
| kerblang wrote:
| > 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
| newswasboring wrote:
| 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.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Its like the "throw him into the deep end" method of teaching
| kids to swim. (I don't endorse it, but it has worked for many
| people.)
| rmah wrote:
| Because, for white collar jobs, that is so rare that it's
| reasonable to say that it never happens.
| monkaiju wrote:
| Everyday I am more and more pleased with our company's (or at
| least our company's tech department) to effectively ban AI.
| orphea wrote:
| My manager thinks if we give it a year or two, no one will
| write code by hand anymore, we will just generate everything
| from specifications in English.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > 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".
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| mothballed wrote:
| 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 after the rich.
|
| [] l IRS management audit reports obtained via FOIA by via TRAC
| / https://tracreports.org/reports/706/
| DFHippie wrote:
| Do you think gutting the IRS is going to improve that ratio?
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| 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.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| 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".
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| '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'
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I make above median wage in the US and pay like 13%
| income tax on average.
|
| Poor people pay very little income tax, as is the entire
| point of a progressive set of tax brackets and a large
| standard deduction.
|
| It is _trivial_ to not do your taxes wrong if you have
| legal employment. If you for some reason doubt your
| ability to do a couple calculations and copy over 6
| numbers to a simple form, Turbotax will do that "hard
| work" for you for $30.
|
| Even using Turbotax, I once failed to report a W2
| (because I technically had more than one job) and the
| "penalty" was a letter that said "Hi, you missed this, we
| fixed it, give us $270 + $1 interest", which I never
| responded to because I am disordered, so they took my
| state income tax return.
|
| No court. No threat. No serious penalty. I didn't even
| have to talk to anyone.
|
| If we are talking about poor people, who by definition
| have minimal income, how do you think they supposedly
| would get hit by some giant IRS penalty? What is the
| magical pathway?
| trelane wrote:
| Cheating on tax credits also comes to mind
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I mean, $200k puts you well above the 90th percentile of
| earners in the US, so the IRS is (if only slightly) focusing
| extra resources on the wealthy. Audits go after people who
| have relatively obviously incorrect information on their
| taxes. For people under $25,000, there's a good chance they
| forgot a W2 or something, which means it's a quick
| identification and fix for the IRS.
| justin66 wrote:
| 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.
| cake_robot wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The audits of people under that are going to fall under 2 or
| 3 categories:
|
| a) People who filled in the wrong number on the spreadsheet
| that is taxes for whatever reason, and the audit is informing
| the filer that they filled it out incorrectly. I mean,
| really, taxes should _start_ with the government sending me
| the form of what it thinks I owe and I should be making
| corrections to that, since the government already has this
| information and has done it, and that would make many of
| these audits go away.
|
| b) People who misunderstood eligibility requirements and
| claimed deductions they weren't entitled to.
|
| c) So I don't know how these people are counted, but there
| are absolutely millionaires and billionaires out there
| cheating on their taxes and claiming no income (e.g., the
| current president). It's totally plausible that they get
| listed in the "under 25k income" audit section despite the
| fact that they are in fact the uber-rich that is the intended
| target of the outrage.
| mothballed wrote:
| >c) So I don't know how these people are counted, but there
| are absolutely millionaires and billionaires out there
| cheating on their taxes and claiming no income (e.g., the
| current president). It's totally plausible that they get
| listed in the "under 25k income" audit section despite the
| fact that they are in fact the uber-rich that is the
| intended target of the outrage.
|
| There's a sleight of hand in your argument here. I said
| under 25k _with EITC_. You can 't get EITC if you're
| "claiming no income." That's why it's called _earned
| income_ tax credit as the credit is intended to help offset
| welfare cliffs as you start to earn more money but at low
| incomes. So your whole paragraph here about <25k is null
| and void as "millionaires and billionaires out there
| cheating on their taxes and claiming no income" aren't in
| the <25k EITC bucket I mentioned, they're in the bucket of
| others earning under 200k.
|
| (As an aside, if someone actually thinks earns nothing and
| doesn't want EITC which they can't get anyway with zero
| income they probably won't even be filing, there is no
| "return" to audit.)
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| This follows the same logic as the claim that Biden bulldozed
| the border wall to make immigration law unenforceable. If you
| deliberately weaken enforcement capacity (and also
| burden/cripple government with unsustainable debt), you can
| then point to dysfunction as proof the system doesn't work.
|
| The only difference is that in this case, the stated goal of
| 'starve the beast' is intentionally sabotage the entire
| government as policy goal. Underfund agencies, expand deficits
| through tax cuts, then cite the resulting debt and
| institutional breakdown as justification to dismantle more of
| government.
|
| It almost makes the people who were outraged at the idea of
| sabotaging border enforcement seem disingenuous that they don't
| now care that undermining federal capacity is public strategy.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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 IRS had a rate of return of
| 415:1, they'll obviously target the lowest hanging fruit first
| but for every dollar of funding received they collected 415
| dollars of tax revenue that would have been missed. This is an
| obscenely efficient organization.
| Traster wrote:
| Implied in your statement - it benefits those who _can create_
| more complex financial situations. Often the complexity of the
| situation is largely synthetic.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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".
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| Half-joking but this is genuinely the trajectory. The
| problem is that tax analysis requires understanding
| intent behind complex structures -- is this a legitimate
| trust or a shell game? That's adversarial reasoning, not
| pattern matching.
|
| The real risk isn't that AI can't find anomalies -- it's
| great at that. The risk is that the people creating
| complex avoidance structures will use AI too, and they'll
| iterate faster than a government system updated on
| procurement cycles. You end up with AI vs AI where one
| side has a 3-year upgrade timeline and the other ships
| weekly.
| akdev1l wrote:
| You're thinking too far behind. They can just use the AI
| to generate what your taxes would've been.
|
| Just have a script with "what are the taxes owed by
| $name" and print the output
|
| I'll take $5M now and you can own 50% of my startup:
| GenTaxAI
| oarla wrote:
| I suspect something like this may already be in place.
| yibg wrote:
| In both cases though, mostly rich people.
| dheera wrote:
| They could also simplify tax law and they wouldn't need so much
| enforcement. There shouldn't be 5000 types of taxes spread all
| over the place.
|
| 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.
|
| Just have one income tax. It should be the sigmoid of your
| income normalized to the median income in your zip code, then
| scale it so that the total of everyone's taxes added up makes
| up for all the other types of tax that we're getting rid of.
|
| The IRS should then distribute whatever is needed to the
| states. The states are part of the country, their hierarchy is
| not my problem; give me one number to pay. My tax return should
| be no bigger than a postcard.
|
| Done.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Didn't they just get rid of the IRS automated filing app?
| You'll have to kill off TurboTax and siblings to simplify the
| tax code.
| munk-a wrote:
| Yes, it was completed and operational and the new
| administration pulled it from public use.
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| > 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 the taxes
| you mentioned are levied by local governments to fund
| themselves. The United States has a federal system; it would
| be a much bigger change to centralize all of the funding.
| dheera wrote:
| > The United States has a federal system
|
| That doesn't prevent there being a single point of
| collection and distribution.
| rmah wrote:
| It sorta does, that's one of the primary points of a
| federal system.
| PieTime wrote:
| 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.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Which misses the point. If the point is to reduce the
| number of taxes, having the federal government collect 10
| different types of taxes instead of state governments
| collecting 7 types of taxes won't change all the
| different taxes we have.
|
| There is no singular place we can change how many
| different taxes you pay. There's... thousands? Tens of
| thousands? Once you factor in city, county, state,
| federal, special districts, etc.
| xnyan wrote:
| By definition, a federal system does prevent a single
| point of collection and distribution. If states could not
| or did not collect taxes on their own authority, it would
| not be a federal system. States would just be adjuncts of
| a national government.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| It literally does, this is one of defining differences of
| a federal system, that the states have a right to set and
| collect taxes.
| conductr wrote:
| It seems efficient and simple that way. But you don't
| want federal politics playing that much of a part of your
| local life. And you don't want your local politicians to
| have to pander to the federal levels just to get what
| they need or what is theirs. I think this would result in
| disaster as the federal politicians are too out of touch
| with local needs.
|
| If we had a single formula for taxes, then each taxing
| body could have their own rate table to apply to it, but
| still collect it directly - then I think that would be a
| better approach.
|
| For simplicity sake, take income tax at flat rates.
| Federal may be 20%, your state might be 10%, city might
| be 5%. Maybe my state rate is only 5% and you might want
| to move here, but nationally we all pay the Federal 20%
| rate.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I... don't understand how that excuses complexity?
|
| what stops "local governments" from applying same type of
| tax as higher levels? why would they need taxes specific
| for them?
| conductr wrote:
| I tend to agree with this. The logic should be the same
| with different rate tables for each taxing body. What I
| don't want though is the Fed govt being the collector and
| distributor of all the funds. They already weld too much
| power with their various funding influences for
| transportation, healthcare, etc. The states and local
| govts shouldn't need to pander so heavily to the federal
| govt for funds.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| 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.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > 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.
| izacus wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| claytongulick wrote:
| > maybe we should change that and have a simpler system
| with much less complexity
|
| Wholeheartedly agree, but I see the root cause of the
| issue being income tax itself. As soon as you tax income,
| you'll go down and endless rabbit hole of what's fair to
| tax, how much, what kind of income, investment income vs
| wage income, percentage vs flat rate, etc...
|
| That gave us the mess we have.
|
| I like the idea of consumption tax _exclusively_ (would
| require an amendment). You 're taxed on your purchases.
|
| It's easy to drive behavior (more tax on some things...
| tax on cigarettes, yachts and private jets) and easy to
| make more fair (exclude grocery staples).
| munk-a wrote:
| Consumption taxes are almost always regressive and
| improperly place the majority of the tax burden on the
| poor - they're good to have (especially the sin taxes and
| tax discounts on specific encouraged behaviors) but they
| should be coupled with taxes on wealth (aka property) and
| income. And these taxes should be somewhat complex - just
| not to the extent we have today.
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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?
| munk-a wrote:
| That's an excellent criticism of the parent and why we
| really do want a somewhat complex tax code even if it
| should be far simpler than what we have today.
|
| We also want to balance regressive and progressive taxes,
| we do want to influence some behaviors through taxes that
| provide positive social outcomes - there are several really
| good complexities to have in our tax code. Just not as many
| as we do today.
| yibg wrote:
| 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.
| claytongulick wrote:
| 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...
| rkeene2 wrote:
| This misses the point that tax exemptions are the way
| politicians campaign for voter blocks. Having different kinds
| of taxes makes it easier to target a voter blocks more
| precisely.
| munk-a wrote:
| I wholly support drastically simplifying the tax code - I
| disagree with the extent to which you'd simplify it since
| there is a very good reason to have property taxes and some
| of the sin taxes have notable social benefits. Additionally,
| using tax rebates as an incentive to install home solar is an
| excellent initiative for the environment. Our tax code should
| be pretty simple - it shouldn't be a single line (or even
| multiple graduated lines).
|
| Until we simplify the tax code, though, can we properly fund
| the IRS to actually audit it? I think my thing (funding the
| IRS) is a lot easier to do quickly than your thing
| (completely rewriting how the government garners revenue) and
| I don't want perfection to be the enemy of the good.
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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).
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| The evidence was the baseline before the increase
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The baseline was there was significant tax evasion by
| high net worth individuals. The staff up was to counter
| that, staffing down puts us back at reduced enforcement.
|
| Someone has to pay to operate a nation state, you can't
| borrow forever to fill the gap and there's nothing left
| to cut. Roughly the bottom 60% of Americans do not make
| enough to have a federal income tax liability. So, we can
| kick the can on the top 40% paying until the bond
| vigilantes make the decision for the US.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| > The staff up was to counter that
|
| Stated reasons may or may not be actual.
|
| If you recall these were not just accountants but agents
| who carry guns etc.
|
| I see this as very similar to the ICE situation. Biden
| has loyalty and power in IRS and so gave it money to help
| him police. As the government gets more corrupted I think
| we'll find more agencies weaponized like this.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Can you provide proof of this "loyalty and power" at the
| IRS to Biden mentioned? Because without proof, it sounds
| like a conspiracy theory without evidence.
| stephen_cagle wrote:
| 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%.
| conductr wrote:
| Captured revenue : cost to capture (could be an audit,
| billing for interest/fees due, etc. lots of avenues to
| capture revenue that is being missed).
|
| The problem is these metrics aren't really scalable
| productivity metrics. If you doubled cost, it might go to
| 100:1, if you tripled cost, it might go to 0.5:1
|
| Each dollar generally gets more expensive to capture.
| stephen_cagle wrote:
| Good point, and kind of interesting in that as we keep
| cutting funding to the IRS, this ratio will probably get
| wider (which looks good, but is actually bad for what it
| implies).
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| That "415:1" is misleading and manipulative. The target rate of
| recovery is ~10:1, which is roughly what the IRS actually
| achieves.
|
| Audits are not an infinite money glitch. I used to work for a
| Federal audit agency that also recovered ~10:1. The reason we
| target 10:1 recovery on audits is because the return on funding
| additional audits beyond that falls off very sharply.
| Furthermore, more aggressive auditing greatly increases
| compliance costs which ultimately come back as costs to the
| Federal government, so the net recovered revenue is even less
| than the headline figure.
|
| Audit recoveries tend to be about sloppy compliance, not people
| trying to cheat the system. People with more complex taxes are
| more likely to screw up the exponentially more complex
| compliance aspects. Auditors are mostly fighting entropy.
| munk-a wrote:
| I'll admit - the 415:1 was pulled from an article detailing
| information from 2024 but the main point isn't the actual
| value but the fact that it's more than 1:1. When the IRS
| receives more funding the US government gets more money than
| what it is budgeting - this doesn't scale to infinity, at
| some point you'll have nearly complete auditing capture and
| more budget will just be burning money but we're no where
| near that point.
|
| Putting money into the IRS is basically a free money printer
| for the US government and it's only deep corruption that
| keeps it so poorly funded.
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| If you're not asking, "how many of these people did nothing?"
| you've never worked in the public sector.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Not all public sector jobs are the same. Working for a defense
| contractor is not the same as working for the IRS. Defense gets
| money dumped on it year after year. The IRS gets starved year
| after year.
| Traster wrote:
| This is the case in all layoffs. Is there a bottom 10% of
| employees at OpenAI? By definition yes. If you do your
| _absolute best_ to try and make redundant the bottom 10% of
| employees at OpenAI, how many of them do you think will
| _actually_ be in the bottom 10%? I bet it 's not all of them,
| it's probably not even close to half of them.
|
| First you've got the good people who don't like the
| environment, they'll bite your arm off for the redundancy, then
| you've got the people who are doing fine but for whatever
| reason are happy enough to take their chances elsewhere,
| they'll be happy to be top of the redundancy list. Then you've
| got the good strong performer who pissed off the wrong person,
| they'll be on the list too. Then you've got the entire team
| that is really good and hardworking but senior management
| figure it's easy to just cut the entire team because their
| project isn't politically valuable. Before you know it the
| redundancy list is full and it has no correlation to the bottom
| 10% of performers, but because it's pretty much an almost
| random sample it _does_ reduce your company 's capability by
| 10%.
| nritchie wrote:
| This is just the lazy comment of someone who believes all the
| right-wing propaganda about government. In my experience,
| government employees take pride in doing a job worth doing and
| doing it well.
| jdross wrote:
| 8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane.
|
| They barely have any products, and they contract externally for
| so much other work
| justinator wrote:
| They have 150 million paying "customers" (not including
| businesses) and bring in $5 trillion+ yearly.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Consider that many millions of those "customers" need to hire
| a professional for hundreds/thousands of dollars to properly
| interact with the IRS.
| justinator wrote:
| That's not the IT department's problem. Well, they'll get
| blamed, but that's pretty on-brand for IT departments.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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.
| justinator wrote:
| I don't think this is the current administration to fix
| the IRS, given the whole Social Security scam SNAFU.
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| The public sector is where you need 12 people (and a project
| manager) to build an Access database.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| And the private sector is how the US has arrived at a
| miserable, unworkable healthcare system and an out of control
| carceral system.
| jdross wrote:
| Is there a single private sector more removed from market
| incentives than healthcare?
| righthand wrote:
| I'm going to drop my doctor this year because he abuses
| appointments. I call in about an issue and he charges me
| $75 for telehealth. Then he wants me to come in to run
| labs for the telehealth call. Another $75 at least. Then
| another telehealth call for the results. And another one
| for the results from the radiology department. I told him
| I have a high out of pocket and he says "I'm sorry to
| hear that." Then books me for a follow up.
|
| Doctors do not care about the healthcare system one bit.
| nritchie wrote:
| And yet all countries with socialized systems pay less
| per capita for healthcare than we do and pretty much all
| have better health outcomes. Further privatizing our
| system will only make it more dis-functional. Healthcare
| isn't a normal marketplace. * When you really need it,
| you can't shop around. * There is a knowledge asymmetry
| built in. * A civilized society can't just let poor
| children die of preventable causes.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Today's Health insurance and health care is entirely a
| product of government intervention on multiple layers.
|
| Health insurance being tied to employment benefits is
| because the IRS taxes money, but not benefits, for example.
| munk-a wrote:
| They have worked recently to implement a self-hosted tax
| submission system and given their rate of return while there
| may be some mismanagement it is one of the most provably
| efficient organizations in the government netting 415$ for
| every dollar of funding in 2024.
| bomewish wrote:
| 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.
| iranintoavan wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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.
| jdross wrote:
| 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
| arcologies1985 wrote:
| They built IRS Direct File which was a huge improvement. Then
| the administration killed it to serve tax prep companies.
| jdross wrote:
| 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?
| righthand wrote:
| 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.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Already could file free with free tax usa.
|
| Not that impressive.
|
| I'd be more impressed we got rid of income tax on salaried
| people entirely, or permit families the same type of
| deductions that businesses get, and only tax my actual profit
| - I can't deduct my overpriced housing, or my utilities
| unless I have a home office for ny own business.
| throw0101a wrote:
| 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, particularly social programs[1] such as education,
| welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.[3]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
|
| Of course the GOP isn't very good at cutting spending, so
| deficits (and debt) tend to go up under their administration.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I hope when someone else owns the whole government the beast
| becomes the us military.
| hvb2 wrote:
| 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
| dmix wrote:
| The headline say 40% based off something a single person said at
| a conference while the same article says the federal inspector
| general is saying a 16% reducation, as well as this quote:
|
| > According to a report by the US Treasury Inspector General for
| Tax Administration, the IT department had 8,504 workers as of
| October 2024. As of October 2025, it had 7,135.
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| My good friend Sam Corcos is leading these efforts as the CIO of
| the Treasury Department. I know a good conspiracy theory about
| lowering taxes for the rich is much juicier, but if anyone is
| interested in learning more, he did an excellent interview on
| Chris Williamson's podcast about how inefficient the IRS is:
|
| https://youtu.be/u4odAXoqRT8?si=UCpIBm8yy5aIaJcg
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| I'm getting downvoted for posting a multi-hour interview where
| the guy leading these efforts is spelling out why and how.
| Makes me sad because HN used to be a place where, regardless of
| politics, people appreciated any new information and
| perspectives on the thing being discussed. Now it's an echo
| chamber
| rmah wrote:
| People have literally started revolutions and wars over
| taxes. Empires have fallen because of taxes. People are often
| emotional and don't even want to think logically about taxes.
| I suspect that it's been like this since taxes were invented
| :-)
| ertg5g5y wrote:
| Your good friend Sam is hanging out with a shitty crowd... read
| the site for yourself.
|
| https://dogetrack.info/people/enabler-staff#sam-corcos
| selectodude wrote:
| 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.
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| 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.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Yeah, when you associate with liars, con artists,
| criminals, and pedophiles in their attempts to dismantle
| our democracy for their own personal gain, people are
| unlikely to thank you for your hard work. Your friend can
| go fuck himself.
| JTbane wrote:
| Feels terrible to be an American rn, I'm preparing for major
| errors and delays in the processing of my tax return.
| krior wrote:
| Atleast americans haven't lost their sense of humor.
| hinkley wrote:
| It always sets off my spidey sense when people say 'leadership'
| because too many conflate management with leadership, and that is
| unfortunately not always true.
|
| Few managers are actually leaders. Many are trumped up scribes.
| And many leaders are not managers.
| analog8374 wrote:
| AI audits for everybody. Of course they're going to do it.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| They can always learn a new skill like programming.
| wrs wrote:
| I started a new LLC in December and applied for an EIN (company
| taxpayer ID, required for doing essentially anything else, like
| opening a bank account). Normally this is done online and takes
| two minutes. This time the online process failed and I had to fax
| the form in. Six weeks later, they faxed back the number.
|
| To be clear: when it failed, I just got an error code and was
| told to fax in the paper form. Which contains _exactly the same
| information_ I had just typed into the website.
|
| I don't think the IRS needs _fewer_ tech people.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Remember when the Biden administration massively increased IRS
| funding and the Right collectively lost their minds? They fairly
| successfully pushed the idea that these agents were going to go
| after average citizens. They never were and you're way too
| gullible if you ever believed that.
|
| Every $1 spent on the IRS returns roughly $12 in revenue [1].
| This revenue doesn't come from W2 employees. It comes from
| exposing tax fraud from complicated tax schemes used by the very
| wealthy and corporations. That's why the Right lost their minds
| about it.
|
| The idea that you save money by cutting IRS funding in the budget
| is just so laughably false that I'm surprised anybody believes
| it.
|
| [1]: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/revenue-and-
| distribution...
| tstrimple wrote:
| > Right collectively lost their minds
|
| When are they not collectively losing their minds over
| something? It's like their one consistent characteristic.
| Jumping from one made up moral panic to the next. Somehow the
| "average" person cannot see the clear line of what
| conservatives have supported since the foundation of this
| country. They lost their minds over the idea that black people
| could be free citizens of the country. They lost their minds
| when women got the right to vote. They lost their minds when
| their objectively racist Jim Crow laws were struck down. They
| lost their minds when gay people were allowed to get married.
| They are losing their minds over immigrants and trans folk now.
| There is always some "other" holding them back and making
| everything worse. This from the party of "personal
| responsibility".
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