this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Funny that they have to resort to artificial intelligence to accomplish what they should have been doing all along.
It makes a person wonder if the IRS has any real life intelligence... 🤔
They do have intelligence, but that intelligence is deliberately underfunded to prevent this very situation. It's impossible to navigate the mountains of paperwork and legal loopholes the ultra-wealthy use with so few hands. That's why poorer filers get audited more often: less leg work, easier wins, at the expense of real revenue and justice against tax evaders.
The issue isn’t intelligence. The issue is that they’re terribly understaffed. So they’ll use their staff to go after a larger group of small offenders instead of going after the few at the top who have big lawyers. Using AI, hopefully they can target the people who can truly afford to pay their taxes. Or we can also budget more towards funding the IRS properly and getting way more taxes paid overall as a result.
Rs will not allow any more funding for the IRS. You saw how they freaked out when there was finding to hire new IRS agents as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, even though it was to replace existing agents as they retire, not expand the workforce.
Decades of budget cuts by Congress have made it so they just don’t have the staff necessary to untangle the web of financial transactions that the ultra-wealthy use to hide their tax evasion. Using AI allows them to do so despite the perpetual budget cuts.
There was an article a while ago about how the IRS isn't funded or staffed enough. Money spent on it is a net profit for the government, but many people (mostly conservatives) don't care about that. 2018 so partly out of date: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted
How ironic, an organization designed to collect money let's rich people slide, and they can't afford enough qualified employees. Wonder what's wrong with that picture... 🤔
If they hadn't been letting the rich slide, they wouldn't be in that dilemma to begin with.
They are not a for-profit organization. They get however much Congress gives them and that's it.
IRS collects taxes, taxes go to the government, to be distributed out for all the various governing organizations and government projects and such.
A portion of that goes right back to the IRS to pay the employees, otherwise I'm pretty sure nobody would even go to work for the IRS. Non-profit doesn't mean they work for free ya know.
Now you'd figure that if congress wanted to rake in more tax money, they'd ya know, like actually want to fund the IRS a bit more and want to tax the rich.
Please with the terrible takes. People with lots of money lobby governments to underfunded the irs so they can have more money.