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.
That's wildly hyperbolic.
People considering speaking frankly about reality as hyperbolic is how we got here.
> 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
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".
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/
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.
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.
Next month's headline: "IRS signs 200-million dollar deal with Grok to use AI to analyse tax returns, determine who gets audited".
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.
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
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.
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.
That doesn't prevent there being a single point of collection and distribution.
In Canada provinces can choose to harmonize taxes or collect independently.
The tax code exists for Welfare Queen Billionaires like Elon Musk.
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.
How quickly people show their colors.
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.
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).
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...
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%.
They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work
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.
Doctors do not care about the healthcare system one bit.
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.
IRS direct file is just not that complex, I promise you, and are you sure it was even built in house vs contracted?
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.
> "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.
"Don't you support our troops"
Which is completely unrelated but it works very well as an attack line
> 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.
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.
Few managers are actually leaders. Many are trumped up scribes. And many leaders are not managers.
SamoyedFurFluff•1h ago
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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...