Comment by jdross
3 days ago
8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane.
They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work
3 days ago
8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane.
They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work
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.
Most law enforcement related entities end up being a money sink while enforcing our laws - the IRS actually runs a substantial profit while enforcing laws and additional funding would increase that funding. This also isn't a case like asset forfeiture where the money being collected is arguably unwarranted and shouldn't be taken from citizens. The IRS's "profit" ends up coming purely from catching people trying to commit fraud and enforcing the laws as written.
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.
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
I don't work in the IRS so I'm not certain what all of that is doing - but here we've got an organization that is highly efficient that's being targeted and downsized for political reasons. If we want to discuss wasteful government spending we need look no further than the DoD which still hasn't passed an internal audit for the past eight consecutive years. I don't know how the DoD is spending its money - that's fair, I'm just a rando... but the DoD doesn't know how the DoD is spending its money and that's purely absurd. The scales of budgets are also astronomically different - the DoD has a projected budget of 961 billion this year while the IRS has a projected budget of 11.9 billion - and that 11.9 billion ends up producing a large amount of excess revenue for the government.
I'm sure there's waste in the IRS - but these budget cuts are not being done in good faith.
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.
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.
> I'd be more impressed we got rid of income tax on salaried people ...
All amazing ideas (I mean that seriously) but unfortunately not within the IRS's power to make happen.
You know FreeTaxUSA uses Direct File on the backend, right?
They have 150 million paying "customers" (not including businesses) and bring in $5 trillion+ yearly.
Consider that many millions of those "customers" need to hire a professional for hundreds/thousands of dollars to properly interact with the IRS.
That's not the IT department's problem. Well, they'll get blamed, but that's pretty on-brand for IT departments.
2 replies →
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.
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.
Is there a single private sector more removed from market incentives than healthcare?
4 replies →