DOGE bites taxman Job cuts at the IRS's tech arm have gone faster and farther than expected, with 40 percent of IT staff and four-fifths of tech leaders gone, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday. Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as …
I have often wondered why, in crime stories, when the 'hero' or 'heroine' has found a corrupt police officer taking bribes, they take the evidence to the officer's superior, who always turns out to be a bigger crook than their subordinate. Always alert the tax authorities to the bribery and say that you are not sure the corrupt officer is declaring their illegal earnings as income and so is not paying the correct amount of tax. Always remember that Al Capone was caught for tax evasion - his declared taxable income was inadequate to pay just for the flowers he bought his wife.
The peasants have no choice, the taxes are automatically deducted from their paychecks. It is the richer people who have most of their income from sources the IRS isn't getting directly reported to them who can choose whether to include that income on their returns or not (or make up / inflate losses) They've got republicans to go along with hamstringing the IRS's ability to do audits for years to reduce those chances. Now the IRS is neutered, so it is open season on tax fraud. Except for the little guy who has almost everything coming in on W2s and 1099s, and has no ability to cheat.
Yep, hit the little guys when their down, Direct File, a free service, will be discontinued by the president. Now you gotta pay to file taxes unless you qualify for Free File or use a third party*(data slurper)
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/trump-plan-to-end-free-direct-file-program-and-rely-on-for-profit-tax-preparers-is-a-mistake
There are other free ones*
https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/ways-to-file-taxes-for-free
That's what really sucks, for the people who have everything on W2/1099 and take the standard deduction, the government could send you a tax form that's filled in and say "if you accept our calculations, sign and return this form [with payment if one is required]".
That's probably at least a quarter of the population. Including my mom now that I got her to sell off the last of her stock holdings that made me fill out annoying forms for capital gains and qualified dividends lol
'That's what really sucks, for the people who have everything on W2/1099 and take the standard deduction, the government could send you a tax form that's filled in and say "if you accept our calculations, sign and return this form [with payment if one is required]".'
What, kind of like the system New Zealand has had in place for a decade or more? - except that if we agree with the assessment we don't have to piss around signing and returning anything. We just a) pay what we owe via on-line banking, or b) wait a couple of weeks for our refund to appear in our nominated bank account.
I can't exactly remember the last time I had to sacrifice a tree to file my tax return, but it was probably last century that on-line tax filing (directly via Inland Revenue Department's web site) became a standard way of filing - now days for most of us IRD just gathers our income data itself, applies all the standard deductions and sends us the proposed result, no individual taxpayer effort required.
Agree with your assessment.
If having separate functional teams or departments helps provide security, then good.
The problem arises if there is no effective communication between different teams. When I started in my Australian public service role there were certainly "silos", but, when I needed something done by another office/department, I knew who to talk to.
It seems, after successive waves of MHT/JWH (or Reagan? if you are American) inspired "efficiencies", a lot of the knowledge of how things work has been lost. Even, just before my retirement, our IT department totally failed to identify the team I was working with as a stakeholder in a major system upgrade, leaving me to pick up the pieces and provide a "temporary" fix
....of a thousand IRS IT people to deal with the tax filing season is primarily motivated by the large number of people wanting to see their refunds pronto, as they used to say in western movies. For the last decade or more, people with normal incomes filing electronically have seen their refunds in 3 - 4 weeks. Naturally, we've all been spoiled by that. For the people still filing on paper.... vaya con Dios.
I file paper, still comes quickly. And mine are more complex than average.
The real purpose and everyone knows it was to defang the IRS. A billionaire can afford very very very very... very good accountants. The IRS had in the past couple of years started to successfully go after the billionaire class. I've seen numbers as high as 12 dollars of tax for every dollar spent by the IRS enforcement group on rich returns. But it is a long slog taking years to work thru the courts. Nip it in the bud elon.
I always under-deduct and just pay them what I owe. Works pretty well.
The REAL problem is a tax code filled with CRAP. A FLAT RATE tax would fix EVERYTHING. Amazingly if you let rich people invest and buy things, you get SOMETHING for the money, like commerce, companies that hire people, inventions, and so on. If you send it to gummint instead, you get people subsidized for being lazy, subsidized for buying things you'd never want, subsidized for god-knows-what, and a bunch of corrupt politicians BUYING VOTES with YOUR MONEY.
[but that just means the class envy-ers won't be able to PUNISH THE SUCCESSFUL. Oh well, too bad, moochers and looters be damned!]
It’s not punishing the successful, it’s called paying what you owe across your entire income portfolio.
This Rich shouldn’t be able to tax accountant negotiate an effective tax rate 9of 5% or less across a vast income, some hidden overseas.
If the rich just paid fair taxes, there would be negligible government debt.
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Corporates to washing money through tax havens.
Presumably the area they were specialists in.
Now they are working in areas they are not specialists in, filling gaps like temps.
Those with any ability will be jumping ship to avoid this.
Wrecking ball politics makes for good coverage, but nothing works afterwards, eg. Brexit, DOGE and Trump. More expected here soon with Reform in May and then at the next general election.
US Government spending went up. Wasn't DOGY all about saving money, aka 'draining the swamp'?
cue crickets.
Oh wait, all that money went to ICE who were tasked with deporting people most of whom were actually paying Income Taxes. More footgun moments from The Demented One.
