I (really) don't think AI is the solution in its current iteration, but it's unfortunate that it seems like they keep failing.
People can still submit paper returns (and this is common for any businesses beyond a certain size- I've seen 200+ pages for a small-ish company's return). Supporting documentation and schedules can be non-standard (like receipts, letters, exhibits, spreadsheets, contracts, etc.), and the forms themselves can be hand-written and the other docs can be on inconsistent paper sizes so bulk ocr of any kind is rough.
Really, you have several challenging problems- maybe 200M individual returns filed every year, who knows how many corporate returns, all of the daily/monthly/quarterly filings for payroll, then for tax season you have an army of temp workers who are responsible for doing manual data entry which is cumbersome.
Then you have the financial management/reporting/reconciliation side of it. The volume is staggering. Electronic transfers in both directions, handling paper checks both to and from taxpayers. More manual data entry for manual payments.
And the kicker of all this is that it actually works for some pretty reasonable value of that term. And everyone here knows what the code probably looks like and we definitely know what the code's documentation looks like.
How would you like to sit down with the nearly 7,000 pages of the US Tax Code and start taking a bite of that monster? It's not a reference manual- the amount of cross referencing with other laws and regulations required would be monumental.
So, you are correct, AI is definitely not the answer; But I suspect the AI is for rooting out tax cheats (or maybe certain tax cheats), not running the system itself.
AI definitely won’t help with that.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/22/ibm_says_genai_can_co...
> IBM is giving its mainframe customers a tool infused with generative AI to translate COBOL code to Java
Hard to wholesale believe claims when they are literally the ones selling that capability.
It probably works well for already clear and well structured cobol.
It is one of the things they are best at.
Tho it works best with small chunks of well isolated code… I doubt it’d be very successful with the IRS’s ball of COBOL, especially considering how little cobol code is available for training sets.
It’d still require a ton of hairy manual work.
Plus tax laws change every year, in many cases causing massive changes. Every conversion failed because no one is left fully understands the whole system.
Plus for a conversion, you need a long quiet time, with the tax laws you never get that.
Not to mention, even with Biden's additional funding, which I am sure it will be cut, it is far from the amount needed for a successful project.
So here we are. I think some "modernization" has occurred, but the core system is still running some 60 year old software.
Note, I knew a lot of people who worked there prior to 2000, so maybe what I know is a bit out of date. But I doubt it since the attempts I have read about over the past 20 years did not succeed.
And while you're having a bunch of lawyers go through the tax code in order to do this, have them recommend simplifications to make it easier, so that instead writing new complicated software, you write new simpler tax laws.
If you have the gall to question IMF behavior vs printed tax code and write it up internally, you will get a reply from an tax code analyst in a couple of months from WV explaining why you’re wrong, selections from code, selections from IRS legal interpretations, applicable court cases past, present and pending.
It’s all very polite, but you quickly realize they’re lawyers and you aren’t.