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.