The IRS Really Needs Some New Computers | Hacker News Reader

The IRS Really Needs Some New Computers

bloomberg.com

70 pointsarbuge94 comments

The IRS already nearly developed a system to automatically translate their mainframe assembler logic into Java and check its correctness, but the main developer was hired on some special kind of program (to bypass the government salary structure) which could not be renewed before the project was completed.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377329 (The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java)

https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir...:

> Now, IRS is on the verge of solving this problem. The solution was engineered by a group of about eight people. And not under a multi-hundred-million-dollar systems integration contract. A leader of the group was Jian Wang, a Chinese emigre who is now a naturalized citizen. Wang told me his solution isn’t a silver bullet but rather a carefully worked-out methodology. It has three components so potentially powerful the IRS has filed patent applications for them.

> I say “was” because he’s left the agency, and the status of the project is dark.

> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

> “The last one ran out this past summer,” Koskinen said. The departures included Wang. He says he applied to become a GS-15 or Senior Executive Service member so he could see through the assembler-to-Java project. But his approval didn’t come through until a week before his employment authority expired. By then he’d accepted another job. Wang says he had a house to pay for, kids to educate. Koskinen confirms the agency wanted to convert Wang. But the process of approval from Treasury headquarters and the Office of Personnel Management simply took too long.

To explain the "special kind of program" further, the US government has a very strict salary ladder (the "General Schedule" and similar), necessary to keep the enormous federal workforce paid fairly and without corruption. However, the salary ladder has not kept up with the explosion of incomes for very specialized professionals. For example, the scheduled salaries generally lie below the $400k salary for the president; top engineers sometimes earn more than that, and top engineering managers often do. This makes it hard to hire those professionals.

The special kind of program here is a special allowance from Congress to hire people at salaries larger than the general schedule allows; Congress gives this right to some agencies for a limited time when it perceives a need (and politics allow). For another example, Congress gave the FDA the right to do this last year to allow it to hire more drug reviewers (a job pharma companies are willing to pay a lot for).

In this case, Congress allowed the program to run out too soon (perhaps due to budget negotiation issues, perhaps due to oversight). Often that leads to people leaving and a lot of social and organizational capital drying up, just like it did here.

Yes. The Department of Education in Orange County called me once for a contracting gig-- The absolute highest they could pay was $60/hr for what at the time was a very specialized skillset. And they had all sorts of ludicrous restrictions-- part of what they wanted to do was an enterprise iOS deployment-- they only had one mac-- and only a certain guy was allowed to use it. It was just utter horseshit.

I still really wanted to take the gig to make contacts, but I couldn't justify taking time off more lucrative gigs.

The maximum pay rate for a GS-15 (top civilian grade) in the DC area is around $158K.

Special hiring authorities are great ways for government to get what they need in a hurry, but can be abused, and should (in my opinion) only be used to experiment (read: test hypotheses) about hiring in the federal government, rather than as a band-aid fix.

Ha ha, “generally lie below $400k”. Usually way below 400k.

Doesn't the president's salary define the statutory maximum, though?

Don't know; probably. Certainly it's screwed up as presidents are a dime a dozen. The guy mentioned in the article is not.

We can't have a government agency go and be efficient now. That would break decades of "everything should be privatized because government can't do it well" brainwashing.

Doubly so for the IRS.

> RhodesianHunter 24 minutes ago | parent | on: The IRS Really Needs Some New Computers

Rhodesian as in this Rhodesia?

Rhodesia’s Dead — but White Supremacists Have Given It New Life Online

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/magazine/rhodesia-zimbabw...

More likely as in Rhodesian Ridgeback hunting dogs.

Frankly, if such a important project depended so much on a single person it was already in serious trouble.

The other 7 people in the project are unable to finish the code on their own? Hard to believe.

Likely that article was overblown.

Currently we have five people on our team. If our team lead left, we'd be in a big spot of trouble. He has the social cachet and the technical chops to lead a project, while also being a pretty decent motivator when bureaucracy gets tough. Losing that person would be a blow. I imagine it's much the same situation here.

Perhaps these problems that require out of the box thinking should be approached like the DARPA self driving car challenge. Set up the problem and winning criteria and give a 10 million USD price and contract to whoever solves it the best.

Might be better to have 10 teams of 10 people trying different approaches than one team of 100.

That's a cute idea, but building accurate enough requirements to complete the task is actually part of the core problem. This team bypassed that bottleneck by ignoring requirements, re-building the application(s) 1:1, and then using testing to prove that they reproduced the same result(s) for the same input(s).

In order to set up the competition you're suggestion the department would need to have documentation which they lack, which also happens to be the whole crux of the issue.

The article made no real case for the replacement of the IRS' computers. Sure, there's a case for updating their software, but this isn't the same thing as what the title says.

I think people seem to forget that newer does NOT mean better, and that an old, slow computer which is reliable is infinitely better than a new, fast computer which is either unreliable or idiosyncratic (or both).

Contemporary IT seems to have forgotten some wonderful things about mainframes. Most projects to "modernize" working computing systems are just about companies grabbing contract money, and if a proper job happens to get done, it's more or less incidental. This is why we could go to the Moon in a decade but can't build a replacement for the Space Shuttle in that time. If we had to rebuild the Hoover Dam or the Empire State Building these days, there's no possible way it'd ever be done in the timeframes of the original projects. It's a bit sad, really.

> I think people seem to forget that newer does NOT mean better, and that an old, slow computer which is reliable is infinitely better than a new, fast computer which is either unreliable or idiosyncratic (or both).

In this case, though, I think there's a good case: the existing code is written in IBM mainframe assembler and needs to be regularly updated. IMO, your argument really only works when the system needs little maintenance. If the system requires regular active development, then there's a strong case for staying aligned with the workforce's skillset.

> The article made no real case for the replacement of the IRS' computers. Sure, there's a case for updating their software, but this isn't the same thing as what the title says.

I think the headline was badly written, and the software problem is what it's really talking about:

>> Though the IRS has periodically upgraded its computing system, today’s system is still running the same code, which was written nearly 60 years ago. Most of it is in the Assembly programming language, which the IRS itself has described as “antiquated” and “inflexible.” [emphasis mine].

They've actually replaced the computers several times, but they never replaced the software with something that was easy to maintain.

I think the real problem here is that the mainframe assembler codebase is undocumented, and decades of idiosyncratic corner-cases and bug fixes are only present in the source code. If the system was fully documented, it could be trivially re-implemented in any language or platform of choice. That's why I think this kind of "modernization" project can be really useful, because it forces the organization to define its requirements.

Edit: Just to take this concept a little but further, I'd argue that "software" is an illusion. Most software, and nearly all 'enterprise' or 'business' software should be able to be fully defined and written on paper, by humans, before a single developer is engaged to translate those requirements to something a computer can run. The exceptions would be more elaborate things like video games, AI stuff, and things that rely on computers to do what they do. Anything that is automating what humans do (like the IRS here) should be written on paper first, code second. All too often non-technical management doesn't understand this, as it's boring and hard. It's easier to throw money at 'consultants' to pry the requirements out of them and then complain at how expensive the "software" is - while the real expense is just asking your business people what they actually do.

> Most software, and nearly all 'enterprise' or 'business' software should be able to be fully defined and written on paper, by humans, before a single developer is engaged to translate those requirements to something a computer can run.

This was literally day one of my systems architecture class in college, over 20 years ago. It's probably done more often than you think, but the problem is the workflows change slightly over time, and rather than go back to the drawing board each time, they just tweak the systems software. The result, though, is a mess.

Surely it's not unheard of, but as a former 'consultant' I would always be amazed that the client hadn't documented their workflow by the time we showed up. We'd usually have a team of BA's work with the client for a few months before code was written, all because the management didn't know how their business ran. Reading between the lines here, it seems that perhaps the IRS is in a similar situation, and the only canonical source of truth for how things work is encoded in the assembler source code.

I agree with most of what you say, but if an old computer system could not, say, complete its yearly tasks in a year then replacing with a faster processing system would make sense.

It's not unheard of for a mainframe to take of-the-order of a day to do something that needs doing each day.

We talk about scaling a lot, but rarely look past "more traffic" or "ten years from now".

This is becoming an issue for the first time because the concept of "massively complex computer system at the core of a business" has only been around for half a century or so. Every year it gets more and more expensive (in terms of both people-hours and $$$) to rebuild, refactor, or even improve the system. People who make decisions see the gigantic pricetag on fixing something that already works and opt for patches instead, which is understandable - why fix something that isn't broken (yet), especially when it would cost that much?

But as the article describes, when it comes down to the wire and a ground-up refactor is necessary for a system which is 30-60 years old, there may not be enough people who understand the hardware/software, those people are too important to reallocate to the project, or there's simply not enough time/money left to make it happen. I would imagine this new dilemma will start to become much more common in the next 10 years as legacy systems age beyond feasible maintainability.

Are you one of the people who bring up https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... ?

The big re-write seems to be what you are proposing...

The IRS has a $11,526,389,000 budget. Their Information Services division has a $2,237,659,000 budget, and 6,089 employees.

So the issue isn't a lack of funding or personnel, it's bureaucratic incompetence.

Your comments includes a logical non-sequitur. You have to prove that those numbers are sufficient, large absolute numbers don't necessarily mean anything in isolation. I'm not sure how to do that, but just pointing to large numbers doesn't make an argument.

I can't speak for the IRS specifically, but I can speak for a few other agencies. The problem is most certainly not incompetence at the individual level-- I've met some of the brightest, most creative people in government IT.

The problem is an incentive structure that rewards constantly adding scope to projects. There are a lot of ways to think about why, but I tend to break it down to two things: Economics and culture.

First, economics. Money is allocated through the federal budget. This budget does not obey the normal laws of physics. There are myriad reasons why (down to the fact that the government can just go ahead and print new money sometimes), but the important thing to understand is that it's harder to remove lines from the budget than it is to add them.

Private industry has a wonderful garbage collection mechanism called "going out of business". In the public sector, projects have a tendency to keep existing. It's not because people in management want to sit around and collect an easy paycheck-- It's because they often have zero control over where the money goes. That ability belongs to congress.

Second, culture. And here, I actually am going to do some finger-pointing. Moving up in the hierarchy almost always means controlling more personnel, and vice-versa, having more people under you means you're higher in the pecking order. If you suddenly find yourself in charge of a 500-person department, well, you might be in line for a promotion to SES. This leads to a strange territorial game where high-level management has no incentive to shrink the size of projects.

The hierarchy tends to self-enforce, notably through the way it communicates[1] (Always Outlook, rarely any type of tool that allows easy communication between management and staff). This is made exponentially worse by the fact that written correspondence can and often does become public record, making it even harder for people to talk openly and honestly with one another.

I think the budget problem is unsolvable, at least by us Silicon Valley types. But one area where we can contribute is project management. Thinking about projects in terms of actual deliverables (SLAs, APIs, usage levels, etc.) and flattening communications channels would really solve a lot of problems.

[1] http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html

Having been part of a company that depends entirely on seasonal business (christmas), I would understand why the IRS is unable to complete technical projects.

You spend all year working on a system, then the time comes for you to demonstrate it's capabilities. It is 2 months to BIG_IMPORTANT_SEASON. A few faults are found in your solution. Not wanting to risk downtime during literally the only time your company matters, your superiors put your system on hold and you get relegated to support work.

The IRS probably works the same way. I am guessing the IT division gets about 6 months to do their work before everyone stops the presses because it's tax season and you don't fuck with stuff any time around tax season.

Fair point. But what about companies that create tax preparation software, such as TurboTax? That could be considered "seasonal" too, yet they've made great improvements over the years. A different scale of course, but same general concept. (Developing seasonally-used software)

Tax preparation isn't seasonal. Some people and companies have to do taxes quarterly, not yearly. Some taxes (payroll, sales tax, use tax, etc... in some states) have to be done monthly.

There's also all the extensions that get filed each year.

The IRS isn't limited by raw money. It does not have the authority to hire whomever it wants, to invest money in whatever it wants, or to set its own salary levels. That all requires approval by Congress. I wouldn't say that a lack of communication between the IRS and Congress is a sign of "bureaucratic incompetence".

And they're responsible for the collection of over

$3,180,000,000,000 annually

So I see no validity to your point(s).

Uh, no. The IRS's lack of budget to actually accomplish its goal has been a problem for quite a while now. They can't even afford office supplies, and they surely cannot afford to hire the people they need to accomplish their goal.

Wow. That's larger than the budget of many US states... let that sink in for a minute.

Many states have populations smaller than a single medium-sized city, so that shouldn't be that surprising.

How about this, then... I live in North Carolina. North Carolina is one of the 10 biggest states in the country (actually, #10, I think). 10 million people live here, consuming government services all day - healthcare, roads, parks, welfare checks, etc.

North Carolina's annual budget for providing all of those services is $23 billion - only twice the budget of the IRS.

> North Carolina's annual budget for providing all of those services is $23 billion - only twice the budget of the IRS.

NCDOR—the North Carolina analog of the IRS—has an annual budget of $177 million, compared to NCs total annual budget of $23 billion, or about 1/130 of the budget of the government it gathers revenue for.

IRS budget is $11.5 billion, compared to the US annual budget of $3.3 trillion. The IRS costs 1/286 of the budget of the government it gathers revenue for.

If you are going to try to say that NC makes the IRS look too expensive for what it does, you are going to need to do more than just point at the size of the state budget to make your argument.

They also have a similar number of employees: IRS - 76,832; NC State - 83,820

This is the only case in which I'm okay with bureaucratic incompetence.

You still owe them the same amount; their delay is just an adds uncertainty to the process.

Incompetence here creates an un-level playing field where the unscrupulous and wealthy can game the system to their own benefit.

As non-intuitive as it sounds, you really do want competence here.

Yes! Because paying taxes is so un-American /s

> Today, the average taxpayer has one chance in 200 of getting audited.

Does this mean 1/200 people get audited, or of the people who meet the conditions to be audited, only 1/200 of them will be audited? The article doesn't differentiate between whether people today should be audited but are not due to the systems in place, or perhaps that simply less people today meet the criteria to be audited and the computers are still doing their job just fine.

A good question. 145,070,000 tax returns were processed through September 2017[1]. If the rate was one return out of every two hundred, there would have been ~725,000 audits conducted.

Multiple sources I found online reported “just over 1 million audits were conducted in 2016” (~1/120) but the number was expected to go down in 2017 due to budgetary reasons.

It is reasonable to extrapolate this value and find it in line with the original “1/200 returns”, out of the total population of filed returns.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/filing-season-statistics-for-we...

What does it even mean to meet the criteria to be audited? I got a letter this year saying that my refund would take an extra 6-8 weeks due to some extra scrutiny on the IRSes part, but they never asked for the receipts or for me to come in so what happened?

As far as I know there wasn't anything especially fishy about my taxes. I did file early (first week of Feb) because we needed the refund, but that alone seems like a poor reason to audit someone's taxes.

I guess the other new thing was that they made me verify my address and bank account numbers to verify that I'm not some scammer trying to steal someone else's refund, but that made little sense because it is the same account I've had the refund deposited in for the past 18 years and my address has not changed in 9. All it did in the end was add an extra month and a half to the refund.

I think this article doesn't cover the actual problem. Majority of the people who work for the IRS are above 45 years old. We're looking at a pick around 50-55 years old. So if they change their system, they might have to get rid of a lot people at the same time. Which they can't or if they could, it would cost them way more than just electronics and electricity.

source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-age-of-people-work...

The USA treasury can't do redundancies? Or indeed have their personnel reskill?

The tech industry (especially in SV) is the only place in America where people and companies openly ignore the fact that age discrimination is illegal.

I doubt a lack of "new computers" is the problem, but https://directpay.irs.gov/directpay/payment currently reads:

Direct Pay

This service is temporarily unavailable. We are working to resolve the issue. Please come back later and try again, or you can visit the Make a Payment page for alternative payment methods. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Note that your tax payment is due although IRS Direct Pay may not be available.

Another strong reason to implement the concept of a simple flat tax, without the pages and pages of magic accounting trickery.

It really shouldn’t be that complicated:

Salary wages * tax rate

Investment delta * tax rate

Why does that take thousands of lines on a tax return ?

"[T]housands of lines"? Really? How many private citizens have ever had a return that long? The base form is two pages. Schedule A for itemized deductions is one page. Schedule B for dividends and interest is one page. Schedule D for capital gains is two pages. So, six pages total for your situation. Barely qualifies as hundreds, particularly since many don't even need to be filled out.

US tax code is definitely more complicated than it needs to be, but the repeated assertions here that this complication extends to the simple case are bullshit.

Have you ever done a 990? I don’t mean “paid for one” but I mean truly sat down and did it? It’s ridiculous and each ridiculous line has more baggage attached to each.

So to you, I tell you that the tax code for the US is significantly bigger than the tax return a private individual like yourself files yearly [0].

Tax liabilities should be a simple event and should not require a tax professional and other accounting tricks to lessen the burden. In the current environment, those who pay top dollar for tax lawyers and accountants are able to maximize their taxes. The small business and individual is left a higher regulatory burden and are forced to eat the costs.

A regular person should be able to properly pay taxes in a quick, clear and efficient manner. It shouldn’t require a professional who’s job it is to deal with the gross mismanagement of government.

[0]:https://taxfoundation.org/how-many-words-are-tax-code/

> Have you ever done a 990? I don’t mean “paid for one” but I mean truly sat down and did it? It’s ridiculous and each ridiculous line has more baggage attached to each.

No, but your post was about individual taxes. Form 990 is only filed by non-profit organizations, which certainly do not fit the formulas for individuals you posted above.

> So to you, I tell you that the tax code for the US is significantly bigger than the tax return a private individual like yourself files yearly.

Your initial post was referring to individuals, so that is what I was replying to. You are being disingenuous by talking about corporate tax code complexity next to burdens on individuals.

> A regular person should be able to properly pay taxes in a quick, clear and efficient manner. It shouldn’t require a professional who’s job it is to deal with the gross mismanagement of government.

Like I said, it can be better. However, I have never used a tax professional. The burden is not nearly as great on individuals and small businesses as you are claiming, as evidenced by you talking about 990s (which do not apply to individuals and small businesses) and the overall tax code(the vast majority of which does not apply to individuals and small businesses).

Stocks can get hairy in a hurry, especially when you have a partial sale of a tech stock (happens commonly in mergers when they liquidate partial shares) that was a former baby bell you inherited from your grandmother's AT&T options. What's the strike price? Who knows?

The tax code is hairy but for the most part all of that complexity has a good reason for being there. A lot of it is closing loopholes that fat cats used to dodge taxes. The flat tax people want to open them all back up again and start from scratch.

I mean right off the bat the grandparent's post falls victim to a scheme where you are paid a $0.01 salary, but simply get an enormous cash "holiday" gift every year. Tax Dodge 101. But the gp will say "oh, then you just need to declare gifts as income as well", and he's starting down the road to the big bloated tax code we have now.

>Why does that take thousands of lines on a tax return ?

In part because of incentives.

The government wants to encourage people to live in houses, so mortgage deductions are available.

The government has an interest in population growth, so there's a child tax credit.

The government wants to encourage certain kinds of saving, so Roth IRA's are taxed differently.

The government wants to encourage charitable giving so it doesn't have to shoulder all of the nation's burdens, so there are deductions for that.

etc...

When you're a kid and all you know is your paycheck, a flat tax makes sense. But when you get older and your life becomes more interesting/complicated, you start to understand there are reasons for everything.

You have that backward, underfunding the IRS to cause dysfunction is the strategy that is used to gin up support for simple easily-gameable tax schemes like "flat tax".

This was recently discussed in https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377329

How do you think the IRS should go about updating? Do you thing something like AWS is stable and safe enough fro something this important?

Why not? AWS builds airgapped datacenters for spooky government agencies. The Pentagon wanted to migrate before Oracle stepped in with lobbying. Those private DCs are rock solid.

As a side note, I think that's just amazing. The ultimate IaaS: your own private AWS.

I'm skeptical of the idea of the IRS moving to a contemporary platform of any kind. They have 50 years into the current configuration, with no signs it will be replaced soon. On the time scale of decades, what platforms have proven to be stable and backwards compatible over that time frame? I mention the decades time scale, because I'm not at all confident that the next revision (after the one that hasn't yet happened) of the IRS platform will take anything less than another 50 years, and in that time, almost everything current today will look like a flash in the pan.

I think they'd be better off moving up one step in the abstraction layer with something written in COBOL for the backend, and some kind of service layer whose clients can be updated over time as need allows. If they can de-couple and modularize as as possible, it will make future upgrades more manageable.

In many respects their data workload pales in comparison to what used to be called "big data". Their system is more analogous to airline scheduling in the need for availability, correctness, and longevity. They have to take a very conservative approach. Even if they were spending tens of millions a year on maintenance, that's a better option than the risk of a major downtime during tax season.

AWS already hosts government services:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/wha...

Start with really simplifying the tax code, and then do a complete rewrite.

Or wait until the whole mess collapses, and start with really simplifying...

So how, exactly, would you simplify the tax code? And make sure it brings in the same amount of revenue, and isn't extremely regressive? And make sure it isn't trivially game-able?

Oh something like no tax up to a certain level, 3 or 4 bands from then on, similar with inheritance tax, but a firm no dodging it policy for the very high value estates. Crack down on all the trusts etc. Toss it into a decent simulation and make regional adjustments depending on local income, and actively try to address some of the regional imbalances over time with national funding for things like schools.

It is btw. far easier to game a complex tax system than a simple one. Talk to your current President about that.

At a certain point, the technical debt on this kind of thing is so large the only thing to do is toss it out, and start again.

"Oh something like no tax up to a certain level"

Already have that.

"3 or 4 bands from then on"

Already have that.

"similar with inheritance tax, but a firm no dodging it policy for the very high value estates."

Already have that.

"Toss it into a decent simulation and make regional adjustments depending on local income, and actively try to address some of the regional imbalances over time with national funding for things like schools."

How is that going to make figuring out taxes easier? What if I live in one cost of living area for a while, then move to an area with another cost of living? Now I have to keep track of what income I earned where?

That's what's tough about public service. You have to cope with what is already there.

It's good enough for the CIA. Why couldn't it handle a glorified spreadsheet?

Easy -- U.S. citizens don't care about who their government spies on/if the spies get hacked. But the notion of some Russian/North Korean/Chinese/Choose-Your-Favorite-Bad-Guy hacker messing with your money? Unacceptable!

Given that Azure and AWS now have/will have regions certified for National Security (AKA classified) workloads, absolutely. (Disclaimer- I work for a major cloud service provider). But when trying to replace a super high profile, monolithic, contentious government system like this your problems are going to be much deeper than what infrastructure/platform to pick. This is project where, fundamentally, a large part of the organizations board (in other words the further right wing representatives in congress) are basically opposed the entire mission of tax collection. The tax code (which is basically the requirements doc) is 16,845 pages long (although I don't know how much of that is individual income tax related). That's before for all the analytics, reporting, interfaces, and other add on's that the design committees take on.

I can almost assure you that's the MASSIVE requirements tome they dev team is dealing with. They'll probably try to break things up and do things in an agile way. They may even have all the trappings of Scrum up to a Scrum of Scrums organization, but my guess is that the executive teams in charge are going to have a hard time coping with anything besides good old waterfall style implementation and can't fathom releasing the system in small parts (and with the ancient monolith in place it may be very difficult to so anyways.)

On top of all that, this system WILL be the subject of multiple lawsuits, even if it behaves exactly the same as the old system- people love suing about their tax bill. This causes all sorts of hand wringing and worry from the executive team, seemingly crazy refusal to change away "from the way we've always done it", and countless review meetings.

Finally the very existence of the IRS is treated with distaste by large number of members of congress, who will drag any flaws in the system up in front of committee and pillory everyone involved.

Given the project context, it'll be a real achievement to get it updated at all. So long as they are able to break up the monolith, it doesn't really matter what it targets at the start, at least there becomes a hope it can get moved later.

I'm wondering if it is possible to make this code open source.

The IRS is so behind. To receive data from the IRS, I have 3 options.

Tape! TAPE! 70's style Tape

Paper.

Yeah, my friend works for a decent sized company that writes banking software. He mentioned that some of the larger clients send a person everyday by plane with a tape for their daily data load. Seems strange in today's world.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Depending on the amount of data and time of travel etc, it might be more economical/reliable to do this than do it over the wire.

No, it guarantees a physical backup not connected to any system. Tape is very reliable.

private couriers aren't a thing? surely it must be cheaper than paying $200 for plane tickets every day.

The IRS really needs to be shutdown. It is a toxic cancer.

>> The downward trend (in audits) has led to concerns that the IRS needs more funding

BULLSHIT. There have been numerous threads on HN about private tax services lobbying for complex tax processes. The amount of time and the level of caution I have to go to to fill out IRS forms about income that the government already knows about is ridiculous. The number of people getting audited shouldn't be a linear measure of effectiveness. If anything it's the opposite.

Quote from the article:

Today, the average taxpayer has one chance in 200 of getting audited. The downward trend has led to concerns that the IRS needs more funding to do its job correctly and competently. That’s true ...

Does anyone here believe that the IRS is a good thing? The tax code could be greatly simplified helping business owners to boost the economy. If you need more auditors, perhaps you're doing it wrong.

Imagine a "Revenue Service" that actually helped companies increase their revenue instead of being a parasite. A one page form, simple questions, simple tax code. Make tax day a celebration instead of a confusing trick of loopholes.

The IRS just runs things; they don't make the rules, that's on congress.

And yes, it's a good thing to have a well-run, competent bureaucracy that ensures that the rules are applied to everyone, fairly.

Good? Meh.

Necessary? Probably.

No one likes paying taxes and, given the chance, people will either willfully or accidentally take advantage of the system. There needs to be a system in place to keep people and companies honest so that the system is fairly applied.

I think that's a subject entirely independent from the simplicity of the tax system. It needs to be as straightforward as legislators can make it.

Simplifying the tax code won't negate the need for auditors. People will still try to cheat.

Additionally, if the alternative to auditors is a tax code that seruptitiously and automatically collects taxes, then I would much prefer auditors.

Citizens should feel the true pain of paying taxes, so that they can think long and hard before allowing a politician to raise them.

Which is actually why I prefer the American system of adding sales tax after the fact. As opposed to many other countries that just hide the tax in the price of the product.

I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but I think GP's frustration is with the pain of the process and not the pain of paying. Think about, there are two pains occurring here:

1) the pain of parting w/ money 2) the pain of preparing taxes and fearing you made a mistake

The pain of preparation is caused in large part by the complexity of the code. Nothing in the American system is deterring politicians from adding new rules and more complexity. In fact, creating loopholes in the tax code is one of their biggest sources of lobbying dollars.

it isn't just lobbying dollars. Loopholes are created to drive behavior.

An example, if you want to do something about global warming you need to get people/companies to buy efficient things, but such things have a higher up front cost (in many cases the difference is not repaid if you invest the difference). One thing you can do to encourage the behavior of buying more efficient things is to make the tax code encourage it.

There are of course many other options, and each will get a different class of people to change behavior. Debating which is best is a side discussion you may have.

It's a big racket to give free money to accountants and TurboTax. No reason we need any of this craziness, just let me pay a flat rate and do my taxes on a postcard.

Based on what I've read, this is the reason why we don't have meaningful change. I remember Paul Ryan showing the "postcard" tax return form on TV - of course we all knew/know that was complete BS.

I'm all for simplification of taxes, though there will always be some degree of people evading taxes. Having no deterrent factor allows people to cut corners and not get caught.

There's a good chance the waiter/waitress you tipped in cash is not reporting it, particularly if you went to a small non-chain restaurant. I believe there are people who work hard in construction, factories, and restaurants, and that people should pay taxes on what they earn whether it's paid in cash or not. It benefits the restaurants to not fully properly report it because they need to pay their portion of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

The ROI for the IRS conducting audits is very high, estimated to be 7x in 2012. [1]

[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/national-taxpayer-advocate-deli...

Simplifying the tax code is a win for everyone including the IRS because it will drastically cut down on the number of people who accidentally get taxes wrong, but you still need some entity to audit for fraud.

I've always wondered: Is the tax code kept complex because large accounting firms lobby for it? Much profit (and many jobs) would be lost if it was simplified.

In case you missed the thread about H&R Block on here the other day, the do lobby for it. It may not be entirely that though - there's also plenty of political capital to be had by pushing for special loopholes for special people.

It's not just the accountancies. Planet Money did a bit about how right leaning organizations like Grover Norquist's "Americans for Tax Reform" opposed pre-filed income tax returns because they believed that making tax compliance less painful would lead people to be less opposed to taxes generally (I can't say they are totally wrong there). Special interest groups (including some thay aren't so special, like anyone with childcare costs) on both sides love "their" special tax deductions.

The accounting firms aren't campaigning for simplification, but they are joined by a legion of others opposing it in various ways as well.

Yes, but not that's not the whole problem. There are plenty of special interests that want their carve out. But honestly that's not even the major source of cost. The major source of cost is processing returns at all. If the IRS was allowed to do return free filing then it would massively simplify the majority of people's taxes because they don't have anything that requires the full 1040 for. That means only people who have significant and complex finances actually need to file a return.

That is one factor. Another factor is the tax code does drive behavior. People with month who are considering doing one of two things will add preference to the cheaper one, the more complex tax code can make something cheaper after taxes are considered.

Companies can deduct R&D money because the the country doesn't want to risk falling behind if the short term "bean counters" win and stop doing R&D. By making R&D cheaper the argument for doing it is stronger.

The tax-prep industry is active in lobbying to keep the tax system from becoming too simple. Think H&R Block and Intuit, not Pricewaterhouse Coopers (however I'm sure they are just as involved, but have less on the line compared to the retail companies since companies will always need accountants).

I wish there was only a corporate tax, and maybe a sales tax. Only because I don't want to have to do this paperwork every year.

>Does anyone here believe that the IRS is a good thing?

I do.

>The tax code could be greatly simplified helping business owners to boost the economy.

How? What exact, concrete steps would you take to simplify the tax code that would not be extremely regressive, would not be easily game-able, and would bring in close to the same amount of revenue?

> Does anyone here believe that the IRS is a good thing?

Maybe.

> The tax code could be greatly simplified helping business owners to boost the economy.

Simplification might be good, but I'd the focus is on tipping the system more in favor of capitalists, probably not.

But you still need the IRS; The complexity of the tax code is not their issue, anyhow, it's Congress's.

> If you need more auditors, perhaps you're doing it wrong.

Undefunding compliance monitoring is “doing it wrong”,yes.

> Imagine a "Revenue Service" that actually helped companies increase their revenue instead of being a parasite.

Even if you have an office designed to promote returns on domestic capital to reinforce the wealth of the domestic capitalist class (and we do have several agenciy with this overt purpose in the US government, including the Office of the US Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce, among others) you still need an office dedicate to assuring that the funding to support that effort comes in as required.

> A one page form, simple questions, simple tax code.

The main lobby against a one page form with simple questions, which given the requirements for information to be submittes to the IRS separate from tax filing can be done with the existing tax code, is business owners—specifically, owners of businesses that make their money selling tax preparation software and services.

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