8 ms·
IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- SamoyedFurFluff 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoI am not following, a lot of things get turned into python calculations, so the LLM is not doing the precise math.
- cael450 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoIf you think the state of the average tax return is "perfection as table stakes"..... you might be disappointed.
- rtkwe 7mo agoMost 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 7mo agoI 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-Strategy.pdf https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury-AI-Strat...
- xenadu02 7mo agoThere are two forces at work: 1. Rich cheats for whom complexity is the goal. Reduced enforcement benefits them without the guilt. They can construct nonsensical schemes but if no one ever audits them they get to feel like they are paying what they owe despite being freeloaders. 2. Strangle the baby types: they hate the federal government. They deliberately want to reduce its income to force cuts to government spending (programs and staff). If they can they will cut other parts of the government then use that to justify reducing taxes. Nothing else matters except shrinking the federal government as much as possible via any means possible. These types also enjoy taking any government service that works and people like and making it as terrible as possible to kill popular support thus making it easier to cut the program entirely.
- kerblang 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoAn 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 7mo agoPhone and chat support has already happened, robotic law enforcement is the future. Now pick up that can citizen.
- Freedom2 7mo agoNotably that isn't an accurate reference. The Combine officer is not a robot, so no robotic law enforcement happened.
- hsbauauvhabzb 7mo agoThere IS robot law enforcement as part of combine, so you’re not even a good neckbeard.
- xenadu02 7mo agoIndeed. Uber Eats now makes you talk to an AI bot among other customer-hostile issues. I've largely abandoned them. The last straw was a driver leaving the food at some random house I could not even identify from the picture. It made me wait 5 minutes before I could do anything at all. Then it made me talk to a bot. When I eventually got it to issue a refund I realized they kept the service fees and driver tip. For an order I didn't even receive! If that's the best they can do I'll just go pick it up myself.
- mschuster91 7mo agoStarve 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 7mo agoThe 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/ https://tracreports.org/reports/706/
- DFHippie 7mo agoDo you think gutting the IRS is going to improve that ratio?
- hsbauauvhabzb 7mo agoHow 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 7mo agoIt'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 7mo ago‘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’
- munk-a 7mo agoDefunding 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 7mo agoImplied in your statement - it benefits those who can create more complex financial situations. Often the complexity of the situation is largely synthetic.
- munk-a 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo ago[flagged]
- akdev1l 7mo agoYou’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
- tokyobreakfast 7mo agoIf you're not asking, "how many of these people did nothing?" you've never worked in the public sector.
- DFHippie 7mo agoNot 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 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoThis 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 7mo ago8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane. They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work
- justinator 7mo agoThey have 150 million paying "customers" (not including businesses) and bring in $5 trillion+ yearly.
- IncreasePosts 7mo agoConsider that many millions of those "customers" need to hire a professional for hundreds/thousands of dollars to properly interact with the IRS.
- justinator 7mo agoThat's not the IT department's problem. Well, they'll get blamed, but that's pretty on-brand for IT departments.
- IncreasePosts 7mo agoIt'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 7mo agoI don't think this is the current administration to fix the IRS, given the whole Social Security scam SNAFU.
- tokyobreakfast 7mo ago
- throw0101a 7mo agoConsist 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 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 7mo agoI hope when someone else owns the whole government the beast becomes the us military.
- hvb2 7mo agoNah, 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
- sleepybrett 7mo agoI do support our troops, i would just like to support less of them.
- dmix 7mo agoThe 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 7mo ago[flagged]
- vhiremath4 7mo ago[flagged]
- rmah 7mo agoPeople 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 :-)
- Supermancho 7mo ago> I’m getting downvoted for posting a multi-hour interview where the guy leading these efforts is spelling out why and how. Please don’t play the victim… again. This has nothing to do with you. The downvotes are because you posted an interview with someone directly involved in DOGE fraud, with a supervisory position. His articulations are not compelling, for obvious reasons.
- pseudalopex 7mo agoThe HN guidelines said Don't be snarky.[1] You were snarky. Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ertg5g5y 7mo agoYour good friend Sam is hanging out with a shitty crowd... read the site for yourself. https://dogetrack.info/people/enabler-staff#sam-corcos https://dogetrack.info/people/enabler-staff#sam-corcos
- selectodude 7mo agoVinay 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.
- JTbane 7mo agoFeels terrible to be an American rn, I'm preparing for major errors and delays in the processing of my tax return.
- krior 7mo agoAtleast americans haven't lost their sense of humor.
- hinkley 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoAI audits for everybody. Of course they're going to do it.
- neuroelectron 7mo agoThey can always learn a new skill like programming.
- wrs 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoRemember 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-distributional-effects-irs-funding https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/revenue-and-distribution...
- tstrimple 7mo ago> 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".
- insane_dreamer 7mo agoDefund the IRS to make it harder to catch the tax evasion of the rich (evasion ain't cheap!), and use the money to fund ICE thugs in American cities and purchase warehouses for detention centers at very high over market value (the corruption in that process is staggering when you dig into it). America is #1 for sure (if you're rich!)
- malklera 7mo agoI am really ignorant about taxes in general, but i do not have to fill taxes. My government (Argentina) tells me how much i owe them and that's it. I get public health care, schooling, police, etc. I do not think the problem of the US is how many employees the IRS has.
- exabrial 7mo agoThat's a shame. We can do better. Let's get those numbers up even higher.
- irishmanlondon 7mo ago[dead]
- JohnTHaller 7mo agoThey're guaranteed not to audit the rich anymore