[munk-a]

They have worked recently to implement a self-hosted tax submission system and given their rate of return while there may be some mismanagement it is one of the most provably efficient organizations in the government netting 415$ for every dollar of funding in 2024.

[bomewish]

Isn’t that a completely bizarre metric though in this instance??! It is specifically the revenue generating arm of the government. If it wasn’t running at a “surplus” that would be very concerning indeed.

[XorNot]

No the point is that if the IRS was at maximum efficiency, more funding wouldn't increase revenues because tax law is tax law: you can't market it or expand the customer base.

But if every new dollar currently produces much more then a dollar in returns, it means it's underfunded because taxes that should be collected, that by legal analysis would be planned for in budgeting, aren't.

And that matters for a great many things, but one reason is that if you pay taxes and want a tax cut then one reason you're not getting it is because actual revenues are lower then they should be due to uncollected taxes.

AKA tax fraud steals from the honest tax payer.

[munk-a]

Most law enforcement related entities end up being a money sink while enforcing our laws - the IRS actually runs a substantial profit while enforcing laws and additional funding would increase that funding. This also isn't a case like asset forfeiture where the money being collected is arguably unwarranted and shouldn't be taken from citizens. The IRS's "profit" ends up coming purely from catching people trying to commit fraud and enforcing the laws as written.

[iranintoavan]

I did no verification on whether that metric is correct or not, but I would suspect the metric would be only measuring the amount of revenue the IRS "generated" from doing manual work like audits. The regular, I owe 1,000 in taxes, and I paid 1,000 in taxes. Wouldn't be considered +1,000 in that case, it would be excluded from the metric altogether. Only the additional "findings" from audits would be counted.

[jdross]

I'm not saying we shouldn't have an IRS, and I think IRS agents are probably one of the best ROI gov't employees possible, but 8,500 IT engineers and managers (who I have heard literally didn't even know how to code) makes no sense at all

[munk-a]

I don't work in the IRS so I'm not certain what all of that is doing - but here we've got an organization that is highly efficient that's being targeted and downsized for political reasons. If we want to discuss wasteful government spending we need look no further than the DoD which still hasn't passed an internal audit for the past eight consecutive years. I don't know how the DoD is spending its money - that's fair, I'm just a rando... but the DoD doesn't know how the DoD is spending its money and that's purely absurd. The scales of budgets are also astronomically different - the DoD has a projected budget of 961 billion this year while the IRS has a projected budget of 11.9 billion - and that 11.9 billion ends up producing a large amount of excess revenue for the government.

I'm sure there's waste in the IRS - but these budget cuts are not being done in good faith.