Slashdot Mirror
IRS Warns of Downtime Risk As Congress Makes Cuts
dcblogs writes Successive budget cuts by Congress are forcing the Internal Revenue Service to delay system modernization that would improve its ability to prevent fraud. In telling of the problems ahead, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen almost sounded desperate in a recent memo to employees. The IRS is heavily dependent on technology, and the impact of the budget reduction to IT this year was put at $200 million. It will mean delays in replacing "aging IT systems" and "increasing the risk of downtime," Koskinen said. A new system to protect against ID theft will be delayed, and other IT cost-efficiency efforts curbed.The budget cuts have been so deep IRS employees are being warned of a possible shutdown for two days before this fiscal year ends in October. It would be a forced furlough for agency workers. The IRS employed 84,189 last year, down from 86,400 in 2013. When attrition is considered, the IRS says it lost between 16,000 and 17,000 employees since 2010. The agency has also been hit with a hiring freeze, and appears to be hiring very few people in IT compared to other agencies.
If these upgrades are so critical, why did they wait until THIS year, and especially during tax season, to do them? Sounds like PR, like the public park "closings" where they actually increased staff to keep people out.
That this forces simplification of the tax code.
That's horrible! Just horrible. Oh, the humanity!
Of course Congress wants to prevent IRS to catch Fraudsters... Half the damn congress would be investigated...
Good.
(If it's actually true.)
I wonder if anyone in Congress realizes the IT staff probably includes the IRS in house security team. Cue the IRS suffering a breach at the height of tax season.
I know technology moves much faster than government, however this is one of those cases that should get extra funding (tightly controlled) in place so they can make sure everyone is getting taxed properly - particularly the mega rich.
"Successive budget cuts by Congress are forcing the Internal Revenue Service to delay system modernization that would improve its ability to prevent fraud."
One suspects that might have been the point.
Kythe
They don't have the manpower for an audit.
This is no more than an agency squeeze play for budget restoration. In other words, bull shit.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
The IRS is an unbelievably bloated agency. The FBI, whose jurisdiction is significantly more expansive and demanding, has barely 35,000 employees and a budget that's over $3B less and somehow it gets its work done. A colleague of mine knew some guys who had to work at the IRS as contractors. He said that toward contractors, the IRS is by far the most abusive agency he's ever seen. They routinely expected 60 hour work weeks from the contractors.
"Burn everything down, because there might be problems in the old implementation, so let's start from scratch." It's fun to think back to the time when /. wasn't filled with paranoiacs, and when working as a team to solve things wasn't seen as socialism.
Yes, I understand that you think taxes are theft. Given that the alternative is either not having civilization or living in a permanent Mexican standoff (which, one could argue, is also not having civilization), it seems like having a functional government would be something to support.
This is just a temper tantrum from a self-entitled Bureaucracy.
Engineered to have the maximum impact on taxpayers.
That this forces simplification of the tax code.
Since when does the IRS decide what the Federal Tax laws are?
That is easily the most insightful comment in this discussion so far.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
... didn't see that coming.
If folks refuse to work for the corrupt root systems of daddy gubbermint then it stands to logical reason that eventually they must collapse.
Are you listening NSA, IRS, BATFE, DHS, FBI, etc?
In other countries, the government collects payroll information and prepares a tax statement for each citizen. People review the tax bill and pay if they owe money. Or they amend any information on income and pay the recalculated payment.
In the US, citizens are made to calculate their tax responsibility, or hire someone to do it. The government then tells them if they have their calculation correct with threat of penalty if done incorrectly.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Instead of systematically targeting conservative groups by sitting on their paperwork, they should burn it for fuel.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Poor babies, so they'll have to get by with just 12.5 Bn in 2015...your tax dollars at work.
All the more reason to move to a flat tax system.
Yes. It's that simple: Shortsighted moronic stupidity.
But this is the GOP playbook: break things so they don't work, then complain that they don't work, and break them some more.
Case in point: the IRS.
Now nobody particularly likes the taxman.
But the IRS is responsible for funding the rest of government.
So impairing the governments ability to actually pay for the things it does, is stupid.
Specifically, for every dollar spent on the IRS, government takes in 5-7 dollars.
So cutting the IRS, impairing it, preventing it from doing its job, WILL RESULT IN INCREASED DEFICITS.
Customer service wait times, ie help filling out forms, has already more than doubled due to lack of staffing to answer calls. Nearly 40% of
callers give up and hangup before even being helped. There's the issue of tax fraud that they are unable to prevent/investigate because of
lack of staffing, meaning some of the refunds they payout are fraudlent.
And again, there is the simple issue of, if you want government to actually pay for the things it does, someone needs to collect that
money. And making it harder for them to due that, is moronic. Sabotaging and impairing the government's ability to function in order to them
blame them for the dysfunction that you ahve caused is the height of hypocrisy. But again: its the standard GOP playbook.
Mr Bookman says it best:
I suppose they think that’s some kind of revenge for the IRS’ perceived persecution of conservatives, but the agency isn’t some
living, breathing entity that feels pain or retribution. It also won’t affect IRS employees all that much, because they’ll keep coming into work,
doing their job and going home at night, just like before.
However, enforcement will decline, tax cheaters will prosper and even be encouraged, honest taxpayers will get played for suckers,
revenue will fall, the deficit will rise and hundreds of thousands of Americans who call the IRS for information or assistance will be stuck on
the line for an eternity before hanging up, angry at what looks from their end to be an arrogant, unresponsive government that is
supposed to be helping them. Those taxpayers will mutter that no business would ever get away with treating its customers that way. They
will be right.
That’s because no business is run by people whose goal is to make customers hate that business. It’s dumb and it’s destructive, but
that’s what happens when we are governed by children.
So next time you complain about government spending money it doesn't have, remember that it was you that did it to yourself.
--
How Stupid Sequester Cuts To The IRS Could Result In A Bigger Deficit
http://thinkprogress.org/econo...
The IRS estimates that every dollar spent on enforcement brings in $4-$5 dollars of additional revenue. As Reuters’ David Cay
Johnston found, every hour spent on corporate tax enforcement bring in more than $9,000 in revenue.
GOP’s childish attack on IRS will hurt honest taxpayers
http://jaybookman.blog.ajc.com...
The IRS Oversight Board, a citizen panel created by a Republican Congress in 1998 to help “rein in” the agency, is even more
blunt about the impact of cuts imposed since 2010. IRS staffing is down 26 percent from two decades ago, and some 5,000 enforcement
agents have disappeared from its payroll just since 2010. That’s pretty dumb, since every dollar spent on enforcement is estimated to
produce $7 in additional revenue to help cut the deficit.
The board notes that account
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Let them have
The IRS suffering a temporary shutdown would be cause for celebration.
I'm not talking about libertarian utopias here at all. Rather, I'm saying a failure of that magnitude (a government incapable of even keeping its agency going which collects its FUNDS) would be a huge wake-up call that the current system is broken.
Discussions that might come from such a shutdown would include, "Maybe it's about time we simplify the tax code, so all of this infrastructure isn't necessary to collect taxes?"
Why is the tax code so convoluted that there is an entire industry devoted to following the code? It's because Congress keeps piling on the laws, exceptions, work-around, and "social engineering". Instead of adding law to the US Code, they should be removing pages from the US Code. To make things simpler, start eliminating "targeted" deductions and exemptions/exceptions to deductions, so that individuals and married people can play by the same rules as the businesses, companies, and corporations. If insurance premiums are tax-deductible to one class of taxpayer, it should be the same for all classes of taxpayers.
Completely remove the "negative tax liability". If you are going to give people money, give people money directly, and not via the IRS. The IRS is not a social agency. Their job is to collect taxes. I'm not sure what to do with tax-exempt organizations in the current climate, but the IRS shouldn't be making that determination off their own bat. They should stick to the "revenue" part.
The IRS regulations published in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) are to implement the statues passed by Congress. The IRS does not do this off their own bat. Court cases balloons the number of pages of interpretation, because there is no requirement to "backfill" the CFR or the USC, and stare decisis increases the amount of law surrounding tax -- another source of law bloat. That's why WestLaw and Lexus/Nexus is so necessary, and why tax attorneys demand -- and get -- such high fees. Those fees can be chickenfeed compared with the interest and penalties that their clients have to pay out when they don't use an attorney.
I don't have an opinion of the Fair Tax proposal, because I'm not sure I understand it yet. But I do know that there are way too many densely-printed pages in USC Title 26. Shrink that down to something the size of a magazine, and many of the tax ills will be solved. Ordinary people will be able to understand the law they are supposed to follow.
As a consequence, the IRS itself would shrink. And the new IT systems would be far easier and quicker to implement.
(pipe dream, for sure)
Reason being the tax code is so complex that to code that takes an enormous effort.
WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY FOR EVERYTHING WE WANT.
I know this is a crazy idea, but maybe we could have a serious discussion about what our government spends its money on, instead of just continuing to write checks for every bloody social program or war we feel like funding, and then kicking the can to future congresses by coming up with a "sequester" that takes a flat cut of every budget.
I mean, yes, at least taking a TINY bit from each budget is better than never cutting spending at all, but that result is what you get when the room is filled with incompetents too stupid to compromise/prioritize in any way.
Two points:
1) the fact that we're the wealthiest nation with the highest standard of living ever in human history, and are having this discussion is pretty pathetic.
2) Congress is largely to blame, but POTUS gets much of this as the nation looks to him for leadership, yet he cheerfully - like everyone else in Washington, largely in both parties - as if the money will never really run out. Every SOTU speech is filled with new programs he wants to enact, and new things to spend $ on. To repeat:
WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY FOR EVERYTHING WE WANT.
I know, I don't belong in politics. Clearly, I'm irrational by Washington standards.
-Styopa
IRS's footprint within the US Department of the Treasury http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
You can't get rid of frauds as long as the IRS is involved. An organization with a license to steal should be talking about others' fraud.
If you knew anything about gov't contracting, you'd know that they're salaried to the company and billed hourly to the government. This is why unpaid overtime is such a sensitive topic with government contractors. It is literally the company stealing the employee's job security. Let's say you have been budgeted 640 hours. That's 4 months of 40 hours a week. Doing 20 hours of unpaid overtime a week for a gov't contractor means you are going to be at risk of being laid off in about 11 weeks as opposed to 16 weeks.
A party that actually cared about the national debt would make sure that our government could actually collect the taxes that it is owed.
Since when does the IRS decide what the Federal Tax laws are?
Since forever within limits. The IRS gets to interpret the law like any executive branch agency and issue regulations and delegated legislation. Legislatures issue statutes and those statutes are further interpreted with regulations by executive agencies and in case law by the judicial branch. ALL government agencies regardless of branch get a say in what the laws are and yes the IRS decides what significant portions of the tax law will be. The legislature or judiciary may override an IRS regulation if they choose but the IRS definitely gets a big say in deciding what the tax laws are.
So you're saying that the IRS unilaterally went out and made changes to the tax law without direction from POTUS or Congress?
EVERY government agency does this. Neither Congress nor POTUS would ever get anything done if they had to approve every action of every government agency. Congress and POTUS and the judiciary set the framework but the agencies generally see to the fine details and have significant leeway in deciding how to best carry out those regulations.
Here's how it works. Legislatures write statutes which usually outline what is to be done but often leaves the finer details up to the agencies tasked with carrying out the statute. Agencies interpret these statutes with regulations which are another form of law making. The president can order an agency to do something with an executive order to direct agencies but once again unless the president is very specific the details are left to the agency so long as they remain within the bounds of the executive order. The judiciary also interprets statutes and regulations with case law which is yet another form of law making and case law sometimes overrides regulations and less frequently overrides statutes. The judiciary and legislature can override a regulation if they choose but every branch of government plays a role in writing laws.
When they are not getting what they want, politicians and bureaucrats will ALWAYS squeeze the citizens in places they think are most-likely to force the citizens to back down. They avoid doing anything the citizens might want, but which the interest groups they serve oppose.
The IRS is screeching that refunds will be delayed (the thing they know will upset lots of dumb taxpayers/voters) by lack of funds, but they are NOT saying they will no longer be able to afford trips to resorts for management "meetings", or whining that this will mean fewer audits of middle class people, or less effort to suppress the TEA party people, or fewer employee hours to illegally transfer private taxpayer info to the whitehouse, the closure of excess office space, a simplification of forms to reduce paperwork and processing time, etc. Of ALL the things they won't have money for, they threaten to delay something that's been part of their basic function since the agency was created, but have plenty of money to add all the NEW STUFF to penalize people who do not buy Obamacare policies. It's a manipulation of the voters.
This is like Obama spending money to close-off open-space parks as part of his effort to get the public to blame the GOP for "shutting down the government" when he refused to accept all the money to run it when tied to a 1 year delay in the Obamacare employer mandate (which he later did for his onw political purposes anyway). It's a manipulation of the voters.
This is like the GOP leaders in the House getting power by promising the voters that they would oppose Obama's immigration actions and Obamacare, then saying they simply cannot spend their political power on these fights (while haveing the power to "spend" on the fights their big donors want). It's a manipulation of the voters.
This is like state governments that, when denied tax increses by the voters, immediately threaten to "cut education" (which they know will upset parents) instead of all the pork-barrel projects the politicians and their donors want. It's a manipulation of the voters.
This is like local governments that, when denied tax increses by the voters, immediately close the local parks and libraries (and particularly the public swimming pools if it is a hot summer) instead of all the pork-barrel projects the politicians and their donors want. It's a manipulation of the voters.
All these examples are the INVERSE of what the nation's founders intended: The voters are the ones who are supposed to be manipulating the government!
The IRS wouldn't need a tremendous amount of resources if the damn tax code were simplified. Some sort of bracketed flat tax would be a lot easier. Any person under the poverty level pays nothing, an increase the tax percentage as the income goes up. Tax ANY money coming in at the same rate (no more special rates for capital gains, etc...). Do away with deductions. Simple, audits become easier (no questions of whether some deduction is allowed or not).
The biggest problem is figuring out what to do with the 80,000 people the IRS wouldn't need anymore.
Who goes around the neighborhood ripping out any Republican political signage has no ties to, say, Mitt "Kittens" Romney.
Doesn't mean shady shit ain't going down.
No rush, IRS folks! Been out of a job for a while
Are they preventing their own fraud or the fraudulent taxing of American citizens? Because I'd love to hold the leaders of the IRS accountable for all the people jailed for taxes they don't actually owe.
Here's a fun game: List out all the laws in the Constitution having to do with money, up to the 16th Amendment. Now go back and figure out precisely what was changed about the law? Then you'll notice a problem if you're really diligent about it, namely the fact that the 16th Amendment is a really vague restatement of the laws that already exist. Our teachers and judges tell us things have changed, but that's simply a lie that's been around for a little over a hundred years.
Directly taxing an American citizen living and working in the 50 states has NEVER been legal, not ever. The Internal Revenue Code never says anything about directly taxing an American Citizen, not ever.
We should all skip e-filing and file on paper instead.
John Koskinen is a fucking bureaucratic weasel of the highest order. He's a lifelong civil servant scumbag and worthy of being shackled to concrete shoes and dropped into the deepest part of the pacific.