The IRS is a perennial budgeting football for Congress, even though it's one of the few agencies for whom increasing their budget creates positive net revenue for the federal government; its enforcement arm is down 30% in staffing since 2010, with predictably dismal results.
As an anecdotal comparison, I had a fairly long-running issue years ago with the IRS over a minor problem (some expenditures got posted to one fiscal year for the IRS, the following fiscal year for the SSA, which created an imbalance in their systems), and I was able to promptly get helpful folks on the phone and via scheduled in-person visits. Now even my CPA can't get anyone to pick up the phone there. It's a disaster.
I had friends and relatives who worked for the US IRS in the 80s, they all would say the IRS was the one place that budgets will never be cut, so the felt far more secure than I did in Tech.
Little did they know the top 1% would get with one specific US Political Party to cut the IRS budget so thy can all cheat on their taxes. It is cheaper for them to hire lawyers than to pay their "fair share".
It's a narrative that's easy to believe in because audit rates are going down. But when you think about it... why should be they going up?
In the 1980s and before, the IRS literally had no way of knowing if you're telling the truth without auditing you. Everything was done on paper, cash was king. So the audits were indiscriminate and invasive, and needed a large army of employees to orchestrate.
Now, the IRS knows almost everything about your finances. They get electronic data from your employers, your bank, your brokerage. Most of commerce is settled electronically. Paypal and Venmo send them your info if you receive more than $500 in a year. There is nothing to be gained by randomly auditing the average family if the numbers on their report match what the IRS knows. The IRS can zero in on specific activities, such as people claiming unusual business deductions. But they no longer need to routinely audit most of us, and they don't need funding to that effect.
> Now, the IRS knows almost everything about your finances. They get electronic data from your employers, your bank, your brokerage. Most of commerce is settled electronically. Paypal and Venmo send them your info if you receive more than $500 in a year. There is nothing to be gained by randomly auditing the average family if the numbers on their report match what the IRS knows. The IRS can zero in on specific activities, such as people claiming unusual business deductions. But they no longer need to routinely audit most of us, and they don't need funding to that effect.
I think that this is a solid argument for why the government should be reducing filing burdens. If they already have the vast bulk of what is needed, and they're able to rely on that to audit people in case of discrepancies, they also should allow people to file more easily (or not file at all) using that information. Many other countries, including the UK where I currently live have a system wherein the most common kinds of employment don't require filing at all. The US could become one of them if it really wanted to.
They're making progress there, they ran a trial with a limited number of states for a few years now and I believe this year or next year they're opening up direct e-filing with the IRS.
Yeah. If you have at least somewhat complicated taxes, you have at least somewhat complicated taxes. But a lot of people don't. If someone only has a W-2 and maybe a 1099, they're probably covered. Even mortgage deductions are less common these days.
> Now, the IRS knows almost everything about your finances. They get electronic data from your employers, your bank, your brokerage. Most of commerce is settled electronically.
Afaik, this is both true and not.
The IRS gets very specific data points, that institutions are required by law to give them.
That's largely a complete picture of your income, at least from sources that are required to report.
What they have no idea about is your expenses or classification thereof.
If we decided to move to a progressive (more money = higher rates) and no exemption/deduction system, then the IRS would have everything needed.
But in fact we have a spaghetti of deductions, because it's far easier to sneak a special interest deduction into the tax code.
The difference is that they used to not get that info.
When I started filing taxes way back in the olden days, I had to mail a copy of my W2 to the IRS. I could alter it, not include it, whatever. So audits would verify all that.
Now w2s are sent electronically along with 1099s and everything else.
So it’s not perfect, but it’s much easier on the IRS now, than it used to be.
For most people, there are no expenses. You could lie about kids but you need socials. You could lie about tax or mortgage deductions but those data are sent to the IRS by institutions. You could lie about charities, but again that’s sent electronically.
There are some edge things, but they are really edge because most filers don’t have any deductions that are easy to lie about without detection.
> You could lie about charities, but again that’s sent electronically.
I do not think this is the case. Taxpayers have to have records to substantiate in an audit, but I don’t believe that information is filed with the IRS by the charity. (I’ve never been asked for, nor provided, my SSN when making donations over the decades.)
If the IRS budget since the 80s hasn't decreased on a per-capita, inflation-adjusted basis, then something has gone horribly wrong. Why the heck would we want tax collection to get more inefficient every year?
This one of the most misguided narratives I see from people of the other "specific US political party" to the one you're referring to.
As another commenter pointed out, if the transition away from cash and self-reporting to automatic data collection on hundreds of millions of Americans hasn't produced any productivity gains, then everything the the "evil 1%ers" have been saying about the ills of government are in fact true.
2) Tax enforcement is a cat and mouse game, efficiency from automatic data collection could be offset by any number of things like changes to the tax code or more advanced methods for tax evasion.
3) Efficiency relative to the 1980s is way less important than the efficiency of each marginal dollar. Refusing to fund the IRS over its efficiency is like skipping work because you need to find a faster route to the office first. Finding a faster route isn't a bad idea but it shouldn't take priority over the point of the whole endeavor.
I know big company/government types often (incorrectly) conflate "size of budget" with "amount of work being done."
But this disincentivizes productivity and is a sign of a broken system of endlessly expanding do-nothing bureaucracy.
The budget for [insert government agency] should never being growing steadily with population growth + inflation, assuming similar scope of work. This would mean government is wholly incapable of productivity, which would be a terrible outcome for the citizens who fund it.
What evidence do you have that the amount of tax evasion on a per capita basis is more prevalent today than it was in the past? All numbers I've seen for Americans is that tax evasion has been reduced dramatically. Americans can't even hold money abroad anymore without it being automatically reported by every single bank in the world due to FATCA.
Not saying that opportunities for large-scale tax evasion don't exist--and you may disagree with policies at both the individual and corporate level that enable tax-avoidance--but the opportunities for people who are properly classified as the the 1%s or at least the top few percenters mostly don't exist without really going outside the law.
> Why the heck would we want tax collection to get more inefficient every year?
There is a subset of Republicans who believe that taxes should be painful. They should be constantly front-of-mind for every American. It keeps people from forgetting about income taxes and having them fade from public discourse.
Scroll down to the section that mentions Americans for Tax Reform and links to the presentation: Doing taxes keeps citizens aware of the tax burden imposed upon them by the government. A Return-Free scheme would allow the government to raise revenues invisibly
> he is the primary promoter of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a pledge signed by lawmakers who agree to oppose increases in marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses, and net reductions or eliminations of deductions and credits without a matching reduced tax rate
This cannot be stated clearly enough. The Republican Party at the federal level has made it their policy position to defund the IRS to make it easier for the wealthy to cheat on their taxes.
It's a common destructive strategy: don't outlaw the thing, outlaw or defund the thing's infrastructure. Can't outlaw abortion? Outlaw abortion pills. Can't outlaw education? Defund public school. Congress won't outlaw the IRS (for now), but they can bury budget cuts deep within omnibus spending bills.
> the top 1% would get with one specific US Political Party
This is where people get it wrong, and VERY wrong. The IRS's budget had even significantly fallen between 2010 and 2014[0,1]. But it also increased from 2000 to 2004, then decreased, and increased from 2007 to 2010. Democrats only held congressional control (house and senate) in that second increase[2], but in some of those times the entire government was Republican controlled (granted, very narrow).
I'm not trying to say the Republicans are the "good guys." Actually I'm saying the opposite. I'm just saying that the defunding of the IRS isn't a partisan issue. It's just one is much more vocal about it.
This isn't an issue we can solve if we simply blame one side. Just remember, you can hold those that you side with accountable. So if you're a Democrat, it's important to be critical of Democrats or if you're a Republican, to be critical of Republicans. If you give your side a pass and just blame the other side, you bet people are going to take advantage of that. And they have.
We can just say it as it is here, frankly. The 1% are overwhelmingly Democrats. They live in cities like NYC, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston. Nearly all relevant US cities are extremely to the left in terms of wealth and voters. The Forbes 400 is overwhelmingly Democrat voting and donating these days. The very richest in the US are overwhelmingly Democrats.
From Zuckerberg to Bezos to Buffett to Gates, the elite of the Forbes 400 are not far right wingers or Trumpers or Conservatives. They vote center-left and they donate center-left. They champion left causes almost exclusively. You won't catch them backing Trump.
The Democrats used to have the south as a voting block, until the late 1990s / early 2000s. Those people are the foundation of the right vote today. The left abandoned them and largely gave up on domestic blue-collar labor.
The government could fix this issue. The problem is, the people who care about this (regular taxpayers) don’t matter. Or rather, people who care about getting this fixed haven’t shown themselves to be a significant voting block.
I recommend anyone who calls their representatives to get their situation sorted out include “propose or vote for legislation to fix this or I will not vote for you” as an ultimatum. If you’re going to vote for them either way (or not vote for them either way) then it makes no difference if they fix the problem or not.
My understanding is part of the problem is that they have not been well-funded enough to even think about going after the top earners, who can easily afford to outnumber them with lawyers and CPAs. So, they give the people at the very top a pass because even if they are tax-dodgers, it's too expensive to prove it. Which leaves them going after middle class people who exaggerated their charitable deduction a little or hid a $100 eBay sale. They're easy marks and won't be able to resist with an army lawyers.
The reason they don't go after the top is because the top use expert tax lawyers to file. Anything they do that is shady is ambiguous in the law and thus had a theoretical basis. The IRS isn't taking on those people because if they lose in court, they lose the people who were paying extra by not exploiting the loophole in good faith.
Also, they say they are focusing on entities making over $400k/yr. I'm sure there are exceptions and trust issues on that statement. We'll see.
>During the extended voting session of the Senate that lasted well into Sunday, Crapo unsuccessfully filed an amendment to the bill to explicitly prevent the IRS from using the additional enforcement funding on taxpayers who earn less than $400,000 per year.
>While the amendment was shot down by Democrats in the Senate,
Certain political cultists are desperate to have their priors confirmed, while simultaneously believing that the only people desperate to have their priors confirmed are members of the opposing political cult.
I don't really have anything substantive to say; really just stacking onto this. My tax payments are not "regular enough" for the IRS. I generally end up owing $15k at the end of the year. It's an inconvenience for me, but I'm happy to pay it since, you know, taxes pay for things to be done. These folks have the gall to charge me money for that now, with threatening letters to boot, suggesting that I should supplement my W2 tax contributions that my employer makes quarterly. Portland, the city I live in, mimicked this system entirely and now demands the same for smaller amounts. I'm left feeling that we gave these folks billions to make things better and the people they went after weren't billionaires; they're instead nickel and diming high income earners. I don't claim anything on my taxes, I don't have much (if any) business income, and I'm not married. I have the simplest taxes in the world and these folks can't advise my company on the correct amount they should deduct for taxes and I'm the one that gets a bunch of legalese in the mail.
This to say, the billionaires running the system are certainly something but so are the people at the IRS who had an opportunity to actually do something with all that money. I look at them less with the lens of victims of partisanship and look at them more as part of the problem.
In my case they know exactly how much money I've made quarter to quarter and could provide better advice to the company I work for. They also could have a system to notify me ahead of time so I have a chance to pay the bill they're expecting. They did none of these, but instead shook the couch for change.
One of the major parties is deliberately sabotaging it (along with USPS, FDA, and NOAA) so they can point out how useless it is and it should just be shut down.
Don't forget the USCIS. It takes a lot of time, patience, and skill to navigate the phone tree in a way that doesn't either end the call immediately, or tell you to visit the website and then end the call. I had a paper and pencil marking my choices so I'd remember what I'd tried, and it was nearly full by the end.
The Cloture Rule is just a rule and such is modifiable with a simple majority (>50%) and has been rather recently so that judicial appointments could be made without needing 2/3 to override a filibuster. If Democrats wanted to actually govern without needing 2/3 of the votes in the senate they could've; however, much like the Republicans they aren't actually a homogenous block so removing the Cloture Rule would just demonstrate they aren't in agreement and look embarrassing (akin to Republicans not being able to agree on a speaker of the house).
> Due to previous years of underfunding, the IRS had cut back on the auditing of wealthy individuals and the shifting of assets among partnerships and companies became common.
> The effects of an explosion in tax cheating would be dire. The nation’s already soaring budget deficit would surge by hundreds of billions of dollars more, pushing it well past $1 trillion. Commissioners of the IRS, starting with President George W. Bush’s appointee, Douglas Shulman, have warned Congress about a crisis like this since the budget cuts began, in 2011. But after eight years, Republican lawmakers, who are chiefly responsible for the reductions, show no signs that they think the danger is urgent. By the time the danger becomes indisputable, immense harm will already have been done.
A better strategy would be to do away with income tax altogether and replace with something easier to comply with and enforce like a Federal sales tax. States that run on sales tax alone need only to collect revenue from businesses, which shrinks their staffing requirements. And since it's a straightforward % of sales, it's easier to audit as well.
These are not 1:1 replaceable. Income tax is progressively structured where higher earners pay a larger percentage in income that falls into higher income brackets. Sales tax is a flat percentage which varies based on item category, not the cost of the item.
And if you need evidence to see that this statement is true, look at states where there is no income tax. It isn't just blue skies in those states. But you might need to look into the details to see that more clearly. There's no free lunch
Of course they are. 7 states in the union operate just fine without income tax including Washington, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. People are net migrating to states without income tax. Income tax brackets are an excessive complication that are completely unnecessary for running government. You can simply make essentials like groceries and tuition tax free, and keep everything else a flat %. It works fine.
I have no issue with billionaires, and don't resent their cash. But if you drop all income tax, and do only sales tax you'd miss a lot of their income.
Same for the moderately wealthy too.
I suspect you'd need 100% or even 200% sales tax to capture what you so now.
That's going to lead to black markets, reduced economic output, etc too.
What? 100% sales tax? No. 20-30% would do just fine. People have already run the numbers on this. Black markets already exist for under-the-table labor (tens of millions of illegal immigrants don't pay income tax). It's actually much harder to run a black market retail establishment as it requires public collusion and cash-based sales.
The economic output would increase as compliance costs would be reduced. Furthermore, you could roll forward investments without needing to pay income tax, so that would lead to a compounding effect on economic output.
I'd need to see the numbers on something like this. Just saying "Someone said it would work" isn't good enough for me.
In my life I've seen so many cases of that, and then, lo and behold, the reality isn't even remotely accurate. An example being UBI, for which there is literally no way to pay. Or ridiculous assertions of "just tax billionaires!" to pay for it, which won't even cover one year of UBI.
So when someone says "just change to a flat tax", without some raw data I balk.
For example, "compliance costs"?! Just what compliance costs are these? Are you planning to get rid of social security, and medicare taxes on pay cheques too? Fine, but I once pondered that many government jobs are little more than paid welfare.
Just what do you do with all those people that really cannot work well outside of a government, structured, coddled job? My point being, that "compliance costs" are no where near as much of a cost as you might think, as typically every penny paid comes back in income and other taxes, and also gets spent domestically on everything from groceries to car repairs. Those jobs aren't free, but they are not even 1/2 the price they appear to be.
You want to talk about a "compounding effect", that's what government workers are.
But regardless, the feds raised 4T this year, and 42% was income tax, and another 22% for social taxes, eg medicare, social and what not. If you're going to move those taxes from the "pay cheque taxed and income tax cycle" to "consumption tax at the till", then you'll need to replace 65% of existing taxes, which are >4T. Might as well say $3.5T at the federal level alone.
Shows an interesting graph, with some of the larger economic states, hovering at the top. I'm going to spitball and say 8% average. (The top 10 US states population wise, have more than 50% of the population, and that's why I'm going to poke it at 8%).
So $700M at 8%, is 3.2T at 24%. That's surprisingly close.
You are going to have to watch the black market though. Yes, it already exists.. so what? It will exist more. Especially with shipping stuff in from Canada, you're going to have to have to have "duty" of "federal state tax", otherwise everything will flow, shipped from Mexico and Canada.
All fine and dandy until somebody can’t stand that somebody makes more than them and wants to point out that because you make more and maybe even spend less that your overall tax to income rate is smaller than somebody else.
Taxes are not just about revenue. It’s a political tool first. As the US government could just print money and dilute the value of the dollar as the tax.
Recent moves that show it is political. Trump administration changed rules on how income is reported that affected blue states with high house prices and income tax without affecting red states with sales tax and low house prices much, by way of limiting the deduction of interest paid and state income tax on your federal tax bill. Meanwhile the current administration often says how bad trumps “tax cuts” where without even trying to undo the increased taxes on blue states.
Taking a step back... one big problem is that our tax code is way too complex. It means that even common people are wading through a minefield every time they file their taxes.
Between unclear deductions and credits, trickiness for those that have to pay estimated taxes, and a mafia led by Intuit lobbying against simple filing it's definitely a pay to play system.
More broadly, our tax code is designed to benefit the uber wealthy. High $$$ assets can be sold through holding companies, etc. making enforcement extremely difficult.
Phone lines being flooded seem more of a symptom than anything.
There’s a good book “The Dictator’s Handbook” that proposed the Selectorate Theory that explains this, among other things. The complex tax code is a feature, not a bug. And I don’t just mean that Intuit is profiting off of the complexity, although that is also true.
Politicians care about staying in office, rewarding their supporters, and maybe implementing prosocial policies. In that order. So tax cuts for the wealthy aren’t because they think it’s good for the economy, they are kickbacks for support.
Every single tax deduction and carve out is a reward to the winning coalition at a particular time. We see this with farm subsidies, which are more of a vestige at this point, but at one time farmers were an important demographic. When politicians get into office they reward their supporters.
The book is a lot better than I am at explaining it all, so I recommend reading it or watching the Rules for Rulers video on YouTube.
All of this is enabled by the ability to print money and not have the painful consequences that other countries have to deal with. What happens when this is no longer the case? All this old cruft (farm bill for example) will cause a collapse. What would that even look like?
Subsidizing farmers to grow garbage that makes people unhealthy or provides a inefficient fuel that nobody wants is probably the clearest definition of cruft. That what the subsidies do. They enable production of unprofitable crops like corn and soybeans. Then the farmers turn around and vote against the interests of the majority of the country. Its is a clear motivator of eventual collapse.
These principles are still true in countries that don’t control their currency. In fact being bankrupt is one of the most guaranteed ways of losing power. The issue is, any politician who says they’re going to spend less and tax more will lose to the guy who says not to worry about it.
That’s why every government loves increasing the national debt.
This sounds a lot like “this codebase is too complex, probably because the last developers weren’t very good, we don’t need all these code branches and special cases, they’re just making it messy, it’s time for something simpler and cleaner” stuff that precedes the often underwhelming rewrite efforts that devs get sucked into.
I’m sure it’s possible to improve tax policy but that’d happen through specific conversation about how dynamics from specific relevant pieces of the tax code play out vs how they could play out, not through general judgements like “too complex” that are basically vibes-based.
> It means that even common people are wading through a minefield every time they file their taxes.
According to the IRS, 87% of people take a standard deduction. There's really no minefield there. So long as you don't lie about how many children you have or any sort of tax credits you're applying for, it's dead simple. And worst case, if you mess something up, the IRS already knows the right answer and will send you a letter correcting your mistake or asking for proof.
The complexity is mostly for businesses, with a little bit of it being tax-free savings vectors like IRAs, 509, HSAs, etc. But even those are largely streamlined.
So really, it's an 80/20 thing, 80% of the complexity effects 20% of tax paying entities. And certainly those 20% don't want a "simplified" tax code if that means losing out on the money they save by dealing with the complexity.
I’ll share my story. The IRS incorrectly sent me a fine for over a thousand dollars claiming I had filed late. I tried calling them 9 times on different days to dispute it. Within a minute of opening, end of day, middle of the day, didn’t matter. Not even a wait line, just “sorry try later.” I finally gave up and paid the damn thing then got a refund for the fine over a year later when I guess they figured out it was invalid.
The IRS is one place I absolutely want my tax dollars to fund and it’s sad to see it get cut to the bone.
If you are an American citizen, just call your US representative. They will have you on the phone with an actual person at the IRS in a day or two.
Literally, I've learned this lesson the hard way. The moment I have to wait more than an hour or so to figure out a government service or agency, I immediately lodge a formal complaint with my representative. They have a large staff dedicated to constituent services, and they have internal connections. They also follow up, and if the agency isn't doing well, they track it.
I've literally been begged by federal agents to leave good reviews with the congressman in order that they don't get their budget cuts. It's a welcome change of pace to be speaking with an agent that wants to help me.
As an example, my son's name was mis-spelled on the birth certificate and thus social security card. We waited for three hours in an SSA office to change it but the woman did not want to help us at all, and insinuated we were committing fraud.
I had it. I called my US representative and my two Senators and e-mailed them a full portfolio of the details. Within a day, I had their office calling me with a special SSA representative on the line. They were able to make me an actual appointment for next day service at the local SSA office speaking to a much more intelligent SSA agent, who was so friendly and helpful, it was almost unbearable. The best part was, I didn't have to even wait in line or at the front desk. She took my materials, told me she will personally investigate and get back to me. Within a day, she called me back, had everything figured out and had completed several steps of the process for me.
In sum, never deal with the agencies if it's becoming antagonistic. Contact your representative. It is literally their job.
This assumes that the Representative is competent, and believes that they act for the good of all people in their district, not just the ones who believe in their version of God. This not true across the country, and particularly, not in the district that I live in. I would never call my Representative. My Senators, not too bad, but there are only 2 of them for the entire state.
The politicians don’t personally do it. You won’t talk to the actual rep, you’ll talk to some recent poli-sci grad or intern or whatever.
I suppose some might be so incredibly bad at their job that they don’t have staff for constituent services, but most do. They don’t tend to ask who you voted for before helping. I’m in a very red state, vote for democrats, and have had state and federal republican rep offices help me out several times.
I'm not 100% sure of the specifics, but I'm pretty sure you get a professional on the phone at the end of the day, not your representative. The incentives are just properly aligned.
I am a very conservative person, but I've lived in deep red districts and deep blue ones, and I've honestly never had a problem with any. If anything, I've noticed that the representatives I complain to a lot want to help more because they think they can get another voter by simply being decent. That's if the rep even gets involved.
You might be surprised. I don't have any direct experience to speak of, but I've heard that some reps whose rhetoric would make you think they want tens of millions of Americans imprisoned, deported, or dead turn out to have surprisingly good staffers handling constituent services.
This is it. Calling your representative almost never results in you actually directly communicating with your representative (for better or worse). You will always get their staffers, who may have completely different moral and political agendas.
Another perspective: The reality is that not all customer service is created equal, and for the individual, escalating through side channels is simply taking advantage of the system as designed.
> Much like the United States has decided, in its infinite wisdom, that caseworkers for immigration and passport services should be staffed in every Congressman’s office and not at the agency that actually handles immigration or passport issuance, there very likely exist people at the bank whose job is working the bank more than it is working for the bank.
> As a sophisticated user of the banking system, a useful skill to have is understanding whether the ultimate solution to an issue facing you is probably available to Tier Two or probably only available to a professional earning six figures a year. You can then route your queries to the bank to get in front of the appropriate person with the minimal amount of effort expended on making this happen.
> You might think bank would hate this, and aggressively direct people who discover side channels to Use The 1-800 Number That Is What It Is For. For better or worse, the side channels are not an accident. They are extremely intentionally designed. Accessing them often requires performance of being a professional-managerial class member or otherwise knowing some financial industry shibboleths. This is not accidental; that greatly cuts down on “misuse” of the side channels by that guy.
Why not? Things get escalated to one superior, then the next, then the next, until finally someone who can take care of the problem. Of course, going from the lowest level directly to the highest level is a bad idea, but there is some middle ground.
It seems like they had some sort of software/oversight issue, in addition to inadequate filer service. Why do you believe that giving them more money will cause them to improve? This seems like some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
Because scaling up linearly is relatively straight-forwards. If the problem is a shortage of people answering the phone, you hire more people to answer the phones. If you don't have the money to hire more people, you don't get more people, which means you don't have more people. When you don't have more people, you have a shortage of people answering the phones.
It's not rocket science.
I have no idea why paying them less (which, not-increasing is the same as, given increase in population and inflation) would make them do better. Are they a petulant child and we're trying to "teach them a lesson"?
I had a similar issue where they claimed I didn’t pay one year. Calling led nowhere but my CPA friend said send them a letter. As in a physical snail mail dispute letter. I could be wrong but I think they have to reply within a certain amount of time even if the reply is “we’re still looking into it”. 6 months later I got a letter saying basically I was correct and you don’t owe anything.
You should be happy that Biden and Democrats allocated $60 billion to the IRS then. It was $80 billion until Republicans extracted a $20 billion decrease in negotiations.
> External applications that have been received are far below the IRS targeted goal and there is an overall shortage of individuals with the desired background and experience
> IRS had planned to bring on 3,833 revenue agents in fiscal 2023, but in the first six months officials had recruited just 34. [1]
It seems somewhat remarkable they managed to hire 7,000 additional customer-service representatives. They missed their other recruiting goals by 100x.
One job requires much more specialized training than the other. My father in law was a revenue agent, and the size of the books he had to use to do his job was astounding.
Hard to believe they actually get back to you and help. Any correspondence I've had with representatives is basically met with a form letter that doesn't even address the actual content of my concern.
If you send details about a particular case (rather than a general political issue) to their constitutent services department, they will often get back to you in a day.
Out of curiosity, was your correspondence in reference to navigating the federal government’s services, or were you corresponding to share your concerns about political matters?
It seems like the congressional offices can be useful for bringing exceptional cases to the attention of the various federal bureaucracies, from taxes to passports to capital tours.
As a European, the need or desire for such an indirect system is mindbogglingly weird. Just fix the broken machinery, instead of this world where "your party" provides you with government services.
Why does no one ever consider removing tax that doesn't make that much revenue? When I look at the tax code in the US half of it only applies to 0.0001% of people and the ones that affect the uber-rich have loopholes to avoid it. Why not just look at which tax is the most 'profitable' and remove the rest?
I agree conceptually with where you're going, but there are problems with this approach.
If there's some situation where taxes are high, but almost nobody falls into that situation, you might find that upon removing the associated taxes, people will structure their affairs to fit the newly created hole in the tax code.
Unfortunately, many complex systems are not created by any deliberate design, but by the accumulation of small decisions which often make sense at the time, but create something akin to horrifying tech debt over the course of decades.
Everyone agrees that the current system is a monstrosity, but there are winners and losers in any attempt to simplify things. The winners might be happy, but the losers will kick up a huge fuss.
But one of the issues with the tax system is that it’s not just a revenue generation mechanism. It is also used to encourage ‚good’ behaviours (e.g. saving for pensions) and discourage ‚bad’ (e.g. gambling).
So, whenever you make a change to the tax system, you are not just changing revenue generation, you are also adopting a political position. Are you „hurting frugal savers” by removing their benefits, or „supporting gamblers” by removing their taxes.
I think many taxes are there to prevent behaviour/close loopholes e.g. the 10% penalty on early retirement account distributions or some of the pigovian taxes like the ones on plastic bags or taxes on tanning salons
We've had to contact the IRS a number of times. It was always difficult to get through. However once we did get through, the representatives were polite, professional, and really seemed to care about achieving case resolution.
This isn't even just a US/IRS problem. It's here in the UK too [1]. Governments have been axing customer service budgets for years now, but IMO it's a foolish choice.
Bad customer service from the government leads to more errors impacting citizens' lives, which results in more lawsuits and other issues. You ultimately need the ability to sort out problems, and it's better and cheaper for that to happen earlier.
I once got through to hold music at 8am only to sit on the phone waiting the entire business day when it hung up on me, telling me to try again during business hours. I've never been able to get through since.
Pro-tip: if you really need to get in touch with the IRS, call one of your senators. They have a direct line that actually gets answered. Source: friend works for a senator.
That's a hacky workaround not a real solution (though I don't think you implied this is a real solution). If enough people know about this, the senators' line to the IRS would be full too.
The IRS still owes me a shit load of money (I live overseas). If I did this, they’d probably figure out how to drag me back to the US, freeze my assets, and make my life hell. They just hang up on me before I even get ahold of a human.
I call once a week for two years now. Now they owe me for international calls too, and I am trying to find a lawyer to sue them. If anyone knows anyone, my email is in my bio.
Living overseas doesn’t necessarily mean they owe you money. But if they really do owe you, you’re best bet is to hire a tax accountant to file the paperwork. It might take time to get reviewed, but it will get reviewed. And, if you are correct, they will cut you a check (with interest even).
If the IRS position is determined by the Tax Court to not be substantially justified, you can petition for fees for your representation. That’s a higher standard than merely winning your case; if you win the case, but the Court finds the IRS position was substantially justified, you’re on the hook for your fees.
If the check was not cashed, you can get it canceled and a new one mailed.
And yes, I've dealt with the IRS a few times some of which they owed me money. It is a bureaucracy, but the process will work even if it takes a bit of time.
yep, done that a couple of times. No response, no progress, nothing. FWIW, my wife did get them on the phone once and she was told we needed to prove we never received it -- that was years ago now.
I had to get a letter from the IRS. It should have been as simple as clicking a button and giving me a download link but instead it just said "server error". So I had to send them a letter which only got a reply on the 3rd try.
Maybe if they had computer systems that actually worked people wouldn't need to call them?
Around 3 years ago I sent in the form to get a tax return duplicate and the required $43 check. They deposited the check and never sent me the return. I never reached anyone on the phone. I eventually resolved the dispute I was having with other documentation. IRS owes me $43.
I needed the address and that doesn’t show it fully. But I’ll still shame the District of Columbia tax department. Truly mean people working on the phones there.
The legislature has successfully found a way to be relevant. By being the only way to solve your tax problem. They create the complicated tax law and the only solution to solve it.
I reached out to them to send a letter to my old employer to correct my W2. I did talk to someone, but that letter never got sent. Still need to sort out my taxes on that front.
Note that in some cases, your employer should not issue a corrected Form W-2. Make sure you understand in which situations a corrected Form W-2 is needed.
Worth noting that the IRS budget has not been significantly cut -- not by Republicans or anyone else. You can see their inflation-adjusted annual expenditures over the last 10 years here[1]. Those expenditures were reduced about 7% during the Trump years, and then increased about 15% under Biden.
I guess you could say a 7% reduction is bad, but it certainly doesn't explain the disasters in their operation. And in any case, the cut has been reversed (and then some) under Biden while their functionality remains terrible.
The body says that some people are having trouble getting help, but if it were anyone but the IRS the headline could be good news: "millions of people call google for help and 2/3 are helped without even reaching a human"
(Of course unless you're, say, an HN reader, there's no number you can call at Google for help at all)
In a quintessential example of late stage capitalism you can pay a service to get you to the front of the line. They DDOS the irs phone lines and give every available slot to a paying customer. At the expense of making it impossible for normal people to get through. This behavior is not treated as illegal or abusive by the powers that be.
Pay a service to get to the front of the line to get on a phone call with the IRS? Not to expose myself as a member of the burgoise or something, but I pay a CPA to deal with that entire problem.
You don't find it a little unfair that doing something the government makes you do is so Byzantine and fraught with error that there is an entire cottage industry around doing it? When the only reason it's so awful is because of policy choices largely out of our control?
What if we deliberately slowed your car down, threw our hands up because "it is what it is", and then said you could fix it by paying $500? Wow, we solved the problem!
You really under-estimate how googleable 97% of customer service calls are. The average person does not make any attempt to solve their own problems before calling customer support. That's just life.
Yes in an ideal world we would have a live customer support representative for every function in every facet of society, but there are a limited number of human beings available for such things, and this is a pretty reasonable place to do a first triage using a LLM for very simple questions.
One of the most observed weaknesses of LLMs is that they have no clue when they're dealing with a difficult problem. There's no doubt that throwing an LLM at the problem would likely fix many simple issues. The question is whether or not it can accurately triage a difficult issue, which is a task they tend to struggle with.
When accuracy matters, answering a question incorrectly puts a person in an even worse situation than simply failing to answer the question.
ChatGPT is not trained to "escalate" an issue because there's nobody to escalate to. You can get this to happen pretty reliably via prompting, and with even light retraining basically 100%.
And here's the thing: most front-line customer service is also clueless about difficult problems. The IRS cannot pull 10,000 seasonal experts on the line, they are going to hire barely-trained part-time accountants who also flub hard questions.
But human brains have a more developed and reliable means of expressing uncertainty, which is still a challenge for LLMs.
e.g. part-time front-line customer service will prefix a statement with "uhhh..." if they don't actually know what they're talking about, even if they do have trouble answering accurately.
> e.g. part-time front-line customer service will prefix a statement with "uhhh..." if they don't actually know what they're talking about, even if they do have trouble answering accurately
You can literally prompt GPT4 "Prefix a statement with uhhhh if you don't know what you are talking about" and get similar behavior.
That doesn't mean the 'uhhh...' is related to the certainty of the remainder of the response.
I literally just tested your prompt, with the question "is the sky blue?" and chatgpt prefixed the response with "uhhh..."
These models create the illusion of thought by statistically stringing words together, but they don't actually think or perform judgement of their own.
Edit: After digging into this for a few minutes, I challenge you to try prompting an LLM to judge the certainty of its own responses. The results I am getting are even worse than I thought it would be.
So... 4o is not confident that only humans qualify as dependents?
I think even a very junior front-line customer service rep should be able to answer that one confidently.
It seems that what the model is actually doing is prefixing "Uhhhh" when your question is leading in a way that doesn't match the data it has. The fact that the IRS requires dependents to humans should be answerable with an extremely high confidence, and that data is without a doubt in their dataset... but again, the model doesn't actually experience human confidence or uncertainty.
Ultimately, the tax question you asked it is something simple for a front-line worker to answer. So either one of two things must be true:
* either GPT-4o is so bad at answering tax questions that it cannot even answer easy ones confidently
* or GPT-4o is so bad at determining its own confidence level that it doesn't know when it is able to definitively answer even an easy question.
Either situation makes it bad for this task.
As I mentioned above, humans are good for answering questions even when they don't know the answer, because they're good at expressing their confidence to other humans. In this case, you'd want the support agent to answer definitively that animals do not qualify as dependents. One could certainly make their chat bot answer unconfidently randomly, or in response to strange questions, or all the time, but then the confidence signal isn't actually providing social value of communicating certainty.
It's one of the reasons why I stopped joining facebook groups. Every day the same ^%$#^#%$ post by a [adjective] [derogatory term] who couldn't be bothered to use Google / Bing / ect.
It would have to be able to fix your records in the IRS database, not just give you advice from the FAQ like most LLM support bots. Which could be awesome, but it'd have to be robust against prompt injection attacks and other bamboozlement.
That's thinking inside the box of extremely low-effort propaganda.
The IRS is critical to stopping fraud and making sure everyone plays by the rules. Currently, we have folks not respecting the rules and getting more economic influence than they deserve. The current climate is an effective tax on honesty.
As long as budget increases to the IRS increase revenue to the government, they should keep growing.
If you take issue with individual taxes that you believe don't belong in our tax code, identify one and repeal it.
> As long as budget increases to the IRS increase revenue to the government, they should keep growing.
Why? The government is not a business. They should not be interested in 'raising revenue'. They should be interested in helping their constituents grow rich; not taking their wealth.
I think in this case, the IRS "raising revenue" up to the amount they "should" be getting based on the current tax law is a good idea. There is an upper limit.
This then makes me think that tax law may already account for "under collection", which might cause it to target "over collection". Increased IRS effectiveness can close this gap.
I agree that the government shouldn't need to be interested in 'raising revenue'.
It does however have to deal with malicious actors who ham-handedly try to game the system at everyone else's expense while patting themselves on the back for being clever. Man, if we could just fix this one thing, think of all the general operating costs that could be cut everywhere.
The US Government has been doing deficit spending and the national debt continues to grow at an alarming pace. To fix this, we can raise revenue and/or reduce spending. The easiest thing is to just improve enforcement of the existing tax laws (which are already agreed upon) via increasing the resources available to the IRS
As an anecdotal comparison, I had a fairly long-running issue years ago with the IRS over a minor problem (some expenditures got posted to one fiscal year for the IRS, the following fiscal year for the SSA, which created an imbalance in their systems), and I was able to promptly get helpful folks on the phone and via scheduled in-person visits. Now even my CPA can't get anyone to pick up the phone there. It's a disaster.