IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again
news.bloombergtax.com
news.bloombergtax.com
Any time I start to feel that Impostor Syndrome creeping in, I need to remind myself that there's someone who's working at Accenture probably earning 2x or 3x what I am, who gets to fuck up big not once but _twice_ doing the same wrong thing.
So the Accenture engineer probably gets paid a lot less than you.
Edit: According to Wikipedia, yes:
> In 2015, the company had about 150,000 employees in India,[31] 48,000 in the US,[32] and 50,000 in the Philippines.[33]
Edit2: s/outsource/offshore, thanks. What I intended was: companies hire Accenture to outsource their development work to third-world countries.
I’ve crossed paths with these “consulting” types twice in my career. I don’t mean to generalize, but these so called “engineers” didn’t understand source control or versioning, didn’t understand basic programming concepts, and lacked any sort of communication skills.
It seemed like you were working with someone who watched a couple YouTube videos (and no more than a couple videos) on some framework, with no former programming, design, or critical thinking skills, and they were now given a job title.
Pedantic: Accenture assigning work to their employees in India or the Philippines is not "outsourcing." The work was outsourced when it was handed off from the client paying the bills to Accenture, regardless of where the Accenture employees are located. By definition, Accenture cannot outsource work to their own employees.
"Offshoring" is what Accenture does by having the work done by their employees in lower-cost regions.
Given that roughly 1/3 of Accenture employees are in the US, is there any evidence for you to believe that this was someone outside the US?
You won't be able to find a single american software engineer in Accenture, because of work conditions and wages, all engineers are foreigners on visas. The only americans there are salesmen and admin staff.
That is false.
You do know that legally Accenture has to go above market wages in that locale for H1B workers?
1. How much of that split is between engineers and non engineers?
2. Outside the US can also imply other high cost regions like London.
All I am asking is evidence this was a low paid non-US engineer that caused this not assumptions rooted in bigotry.
US contractor labor rates are typically below market, and typically auditable as GSA labor rates (T&M).
It’s possible there was “outsourcing” to some lower-income area in the US. Most large firms setup large dev factories in the Midwest/south-Midwest.
Although I would still guess that for reasons other than being offshore, they are earning market or less (or overworked to reduce any higher comp to lower effective hourly rates).
A developer in the U.S. has far better employment options.
It can be hard to do the real important security stuff when burdened by the administrative security and audit requirements requisite with government work.
A lot of smart people leave in frustration.
I'd personally blame 70% of the blame on the IRS, 30% on the contractor. Organizations should not be able to skirt blame by way of contractor IMO. Hope the IRS gets fined for gross negligence and breach of data. (lol)
https://muckrock.com is my weapon of choice for data liberation, but a letter or email works equally well.
Contractors come and go, and the government isn’t supposed to micromanage them - that’s one of the features theoretically making them less expensive than staff - so those qualified people may never be seen after the start of the project, or they might be in some kind of “oversight” capacity where they’re quintuple booked theoretically keeping the much cheaper people doing the actual work from failing too badly.
On the government side, they likely don’t have qualified technical staff (or enough of their time) after years of “cost savings” where every dollar cut from the staff budget corresponds to 2-3 dollars going to contractors. That means that problems will progress further, especially because the contract PM isn’t going to say that the contract developers are doing terribly after months of saying sprint velocity is good. Even if they’re on different contracts, the odds are good they’ve either worked together before or don’t want to rule out future work at the other company.
So, things careened down the tracks and now people are realizing that the green lights on dashboards were in fact optimistic. The government can ask for things to be fixed but if there’s pushback, they risk _every_ project on that contract and it’s expensive because they have to show some kind of malfeasance to get money back or possibly even to stop wasting more (want to bet there’s never been any scope creep which could be blamed?). It’s _much_ easier to try seeing whether the claim that this was a one-time mishap was true than to deal with all of that.
Any time you see something like this, it’s always possible that you have someone totally failing to do their job but it’s far more likely that you’re seeing a bunch of people trying to do their best with a system they know isn’t effective but which they have no direct means to improve.
The IRS is 100% responsible.
if they wanted to spin off college football to a semi-pro league and let actual students play the game instead of "students" who get private tutors, sleep in a private dorm, have a private cafeteria, take exclusive classes, and generally don't interact with the rest of the student body, I would support this movement.
You might be thinking of Major League Baseball?
Baseball has an exemption due to a court case, though their hiring cartel was broken in the courts, resulting in free agency (same for NFL, with the Roselle(?) case).
But the important one is all about the money: monopoly control over monetization of broadcast. I direct you to 15 U.S. Code § 1291 which you can read for yourself at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1291
This is not true now, and arguably never was (at least not with the intention it's generally applied).
The NFL relinquished its tax exempt status in 2015, but even before that the NFL was not a 501(c)(3) but a 501(c)(6) (a trade organization) -- for interests of fairness (proven more necessary recently by actions of the Washington Commanders) the NFL collected ticket moneys and broadcast earnings and then distributed the money to the teams, where it was taxed. Without that, they'd have been taxed on the collection and on the disbursement, which would have meant that the teams were taxed twice.
There are, to my opinion anyway, better reasons to be mad at the NFL than as a tax dodge, because they weren't ever particularly good at meeting the definition.
you mean to say in your first breath that the 501(c) series of US IRS tax structures are not called "non-profit" but then in the next breath confirm that the NFL was in fact 501(c)(6) ?
I do not say I was "mad" so, let's not include that as a summary of what I wrote, eh?
If that wasn't what you were trying to do, then I apologize for letting my confirmation bias get in the way of more accurately addressing the criticism.
Are you suggesting that everyone involved from attorney generals to congressmen, senators, federal judges, and Supreme Court justices (not a one of which - including the two Trump appointees - formally registered their disagreement with the unanimous decisions/reviews or lack thereof) were, somehow, making decisions and getting something out of deciding/acting contrary to how they would have otherwise?
When an unelected person has an opinion (which they're certainly entitled to have in their private life) and uses their government position to put their thumb on the scale of how people / organizations are treated to match their ideological beliefs, that's a different kind of corruption.
This is bad of course, but I’m kind of amazed it was only 112k. Given the 330some million citizens, and presumably some more entities that also pay taxes, this is a relatively small number.