Plans to double the number of IRS employees a good idea?

I do. I know someone who has worked at the IRS for 25 years. She thinks we could do MORE work if we fired 1/2 of the workers (the ones who do absolutely nothing).

If they are hiring mostly auditors and forensic accountants, then I am all for it. Start catching the tax cheats and making them pay.

Ever notice on right wing talk radio that nearly every commercial break includes a national or local ad stating, "Having trouble with the IRS? Owe $10,000 or more in back taxes, penalties, and garnishments? Afraid that the IRS will confiscate your house, boat, or retirement savings? Call our team of tax experts at 1-800..."

They know their market: middle aged conservative small business owners that are knowingly not filing or paying properly. No need to run those ads on the Top 40, hip hop, or sports stations.

Definitely a good idea. Every dollar of funding for the IRS generates, what, six dollars of revenue or something? Fund the IRS properly, and we can leave fights about new taxes for later.

Unlike most government hiring, this would probably be the only case where personnel are a good investment with a positive return. Maybe enforcing existing tax laws would lead to less frequent tax raises.

elviejo wrote:

I do. I know someone who has worked at the IRS for 25 years. She thinks we could do MORE work if we fired 1/2 of the workers (the ones who do absolutely nothing).

Well, on the other hand, my accountant says that they massive numbers of paper returns that they can't process because they lack the people to process them. And (I think) a lot of people who file paper do so for a reason (wink wink).

Anecdotally, it seems possible that they have not processed my teenager's paper return from 2019 yet as the efile provider he used this year could not verify items from last year from the IRS systems.

Definitely worthwhile to increase the auditing of 1%er types cheating on their taxes.

Bad idea.

They need more AI and bots.

Need fewer people.

Prepare to be disappointed at how much revenue it "generates"

Excellent idea. Rich people basically get off scot-free now because they don't have the personnel to chase down the more complicated tax avoiders with expensive accountants and lawyers, like our former president, whose case has been going on for something like six years. As it stands now, the regular guy is caught all the time for minor errors (for instance, if you claim a home office, it better be the right square footage of your house because they flag half of those claims for audits). Indeed, that work doesn't pay off much at all, because we're talking about peanuts and they already have all the information they need to do our taxes for us--that's how they can correct our calculations so fast. Change the law to let the IRS do the taxes automatically for people based on our payroll information, which they have and which they do in other countries, and let the IRS employees go after the big money and complicated returns.

Incidentally, the Pale King, the David Foster Wallace unfinished book about the IRS has some pretty great sections about taxes and the agency.

They say that they'd get about 10:1 return on the investment in more IRS employees.

Or we could just simplify the tax code so that we don't need a massive IRS and an army of CPAs to handle all the pencil pushing.

The purpose of taxation is to raise revenue for the government, so stop trying to use it to incentivize behavior. Just create a marginal tax rate schedule, I'll tell you how much I earned, and you'll tell me how much I owe. It could all be just as simple and automated as making a purchase on Amazon.

make it simple wrote:

Or we could just simplify the tax code so that we don't need a massive IRS and an army of CPAs to handle all the pencil pushing.

The purpose of taxation is to raise revenue for the government, so stop trying to use it to incentivize behavior. Just create a marginal tax rate schedule, I'll tell you how much I earned, and you'll tell me how much I owe. It could all be just as simple and automated as making a purchase on Amazon.

Agree on simple tax code. National sales tax with a rebate program.

make it simple wrote:

Or we could just simplify the tax code so that we don't need a massive IRS and an army of CPAs to handle all the pencil pushing.

The purpose of taxation is to raise revenue for the government, so stop trying to use it to incentivize behavior. Just create a marginal tax rate schedule, I'll tell you how much I earned, and you'll tell me how much I owe. It could all be just as simple and automated as making a purchase on Amazon.

You still need all the tax code to define what you earned. For wage slaves it is easy. For owners? Not so easy. There is no way to simply the code to eliminate people trying to write off personal expenses and bussiness and so on.

There are areas where taxes could be simplified but they are pretty minor. It doesn't help that TurboTax works hard to block them...

Bad idea. Most wealthy people tend to follow the rules and get dinged on small stuff. The real place where people don't pay taxes is in the informal economy (bartered transactions, black market drug deals, street vendors selling hotdogs and tamales, waitresses not paying tips, etc.). There is as much (if not more) tax evasion among the poorer classes. Among the well heeled, there are a few bad actors that give the rest a bad reputation.