[AnthonyMouse]

> If NPR were broadcasting the rantings of flat earthers, Sasquatch hunters, and anti-vax weirdos, it may be entertaining but it wouldn’t be news.

Surely you can see the difference between airing the view that it's reasonable and expected for the modern IRS to have significantly fewer employees per capita than they did before the advent of computers, and airing the view that autism is caused by Lizardmen.

[specialist]

No?

Computers can do audits and litigate cases now?

[AnthonyMouse]

Computers remove the need to have an army people to open envelopes and file all of the tax returns of the many millions of people who aren't getting audited and now file electronically, and electronically process payments or tax refunds, and validate the numbers on each tax return against the 1099s and W2s submitted by employers to make sure they match etc. All of these things used to be done by hand and it should certainly not require anywhere near as much labor to do them electronically.

[faeriechangling]

Honestly no, because cuts to the IRS have clearly and blatantly been motivated by lobbying and the desire to make the IRS less effectual at tax collection.

The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.

there's a number of reasonable "defund the IRS" arguments I could entertain, such is "tax collection is bad", but the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so. The cuts were directly agitated for by lobbying groups like CEETA, of which Microsoft is a member, Microsoft having a massive pending IRS tax case.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Honestly no, because cuts to the IRS have clearly and blatantly been motivated by lobbying and the desire to make the IRS less effectual at tax collection.

The other side of this coin is that every time the IRS audits anyone, they have to incur significant uncompensated costs to deal with the audit even if they've done nothing wrong. Anyone subjected to this obviously and reasonably is not going to like it, and allowing the government to convert all of the efficiency gains from computerization into more staff to impose those costs on innocent people is not inherently the right thing to do.

> The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.

How many staff they have and who they target with those resources are two separate issues.

> the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so.

If they had N employees doing audits and M employees doing clerical work, and now computers mean they only need 10% as many employees to do clerical work, it is completely reasonable to say that they should now be able to do the same work as before with 10% as many clerical employees because that is what happened.

[faeriechangling]

>How many staff they have and who they target with those resources are two separate issues.

They may be two separate issues, but they are two interconnected issues, as with limited legal resources its more profitable to audit average people than to audit the wealthy who can evidently hold you up in court for decades, whereas with more legal resources there's more of an incentive to go after the high-hanging fruit since you'll already have the low-hanging fruit covered and have exhausted their resources already.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's the "having exhausted their resources already" which is the problem.

Suppose the IRS can audit a thousand small businesses and they recover more from this than their own costs. But at the same time most of the small businesses are innocent, and the audits collectively cost them several times as much as the IRS "profits". This is not a socially beneficial undertaking because the net costs across society exceed the net benefits, even if it has higher margins to the IRS than auditing large companies.

If you specifically want the IRS to target large companies then you can have them do that regardless of whether the margin of that to the IRS is less lucrative than the behavior that imposes more uncompensated costs on smaller businesses.

[faeriechangling]

Maybe give them a collar and throw them a bone in the same legislation? I feel strongly like large companies have successfully lobbied and propagandised to conflate funding the IRS enough to effectually go after their rampant tax evasion with hurting small businesses.

It's not really all that hard to earmark a certain amount of IRS funds to only go after companies over XX size. I think this is actually essential under neoliberalism because one of the fatal flaws of neoliberalism is giving large companies more wealth & power and then expecting to be able to tax that back to fund the welfare state, which generally falls on its face as you've just given large companies all the wealth and power in the world to stop that from even happening. If neoliberalism is to survive as a political ideology and for us to not end up adopting socialism (which is bureaucratic and corrupt and inefficient), it's sort of essential that organisations like the IRS have a decent amount of power and for them to direct that power at large institutions.