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

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

> 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".

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

I am not following, a lot of things get turned into python calculations, so the LLM is not doing the precise math.

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

I hope when someone else owns the whole government the beast becomes the us military.

Atleast americans haven't lost their sense of humor.

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’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

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.

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/

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%.

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.

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.

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.

They built IRS Direct File which was a huge improvement. Then the administration killed it to serve tax prep companies.

They have 150 million paying "customers" (not including businesses) and bring in $5 trillion+ yearly.

The public sector is where you need 12 people (and a project manager) to build an Access database.