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Comment by ipaddr | Hacker News Reader

80,000 is a few staff?

It was 115,000+ in the early 90s. The US population grew by 33% while the IRS staff shrank by 30%.

Then add the additional economic activity and fraud vehicles created by the internet. It's a job I admire but do not envy.

I am sympathetic to the overall argument that IRS man hours available to "do useful stuff" is lower per capita than it used to be but I think your numbers are potentially way off.

Everything also got digitized in that time which is somewhat of a confounding factor.

We should probably be comparing IRS staffing to the fraction of the population employed in the private sector equivalent roles.

> Everything also got digitized in that time which is somewhat of a confounding factor.

The IRS being a large federal agency, it's possible that everything except the IRS got digitized...

Or, you know, the IRS "got digitized". In the 90s / 00s -- so, with humongously clunky systems built by huge consulting firms to the standards of (at least) ten years earlier.

Unfortunately, yes. @HeatrayEnjoyer said it well.

80k new jobs is barely slowing the problem down.

I was sympathetic to the argument that the IRS is overburdened with work before.

But the IRS spent a year harassing me about $300. If that’s the scale of supposed tax fraud that they’re spending staffing resources on I think their prioritization could be improved.

You're a private citizen (I assume?), so far easier to automate than the big guys. That was probably a result of them "being digitized" (see my other comment around here), so some buggy automatic system kept flagging you and the poor drones had to respond to the ticket.

Meanwhile, the real big tax fraudsters use convoluted bespoke schemes that the IRS's clunky systems can't be ayutomated to detect, so no tickets are raised about them.

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