Doge Is Planning a Hackathon at the IRS. It Wants Easier Access to Taxpayer Data | Hacker News Reader

Doge Is Planning a Hackathon at the IRS. It Wants Easier Access to Taxpayer Data

wired.com

53 pointsdanso30 comments

> Next week, DOGE and IRS leadership are expected to host dozens of engineers in DC so they can begin “ripping up the old systems” and building the API, an IRS engineering source tells WIRED. The goal is to have this task completed within 30 days. Sources say there have been multiple discussions about involving third-party cloud and software providers like Palantir in the implementation.

Well yeah, obviously bring in Palantir. 10x the headcount so they can have the task completed in 3 days.

So many mythical man months incoming.

Doesn't this mean Palantir noped?

I think the group of people that work on this should petition for their tax data to be the first to be used. Seems to align the incentives on internal controls of PPI.

Then those who vote for higher public services should be the ones to pay.

Which, if they did, would solve the left/right dichotomy. But no, those who want the public services want the money taken from the other half.

Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.

At the thought of leftists in power, I think open data day at the IRS is really not bad.

Worse: I think the leftists are the firsts to be afraid of having the tax data spilled in public. We’d Trump’s records, but we’d also see the Dems’ records. And that’s something they’re afraid of.

You can find most other residential candidate returns at https://www.taxnotes.com/presidential-tax-returns

The current Vice-President hasn’t released any. The former President only has some posted due to successful subpoena.

> Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.

"We destroyed the economy for a generation, but at least we stopped people from making us put pronouns in our bio."

> at least we stopped people from making us put pronouns in our bio.

More accurately: at least we forced other people to stop putting pronouns in their bio

It‘s the worst ideas together, but the alternative is even worse? That does not make any sense, logically. But I guess this summarizes the current situation quite nicely.

> Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.

There were basically no leftists running under any major party banner for any federal office in the US, and the small number of arguable center-leftists doing so in the general election were mostly incumbents, and mostly reelected.

It was not, in fact, a choice between leftists and what we got, it was a choice between the center-right corporate capitalist wing of the Democratic Party and what is, at best, lawless kleptocracy and at worst outright fascism.

> At the thought of leftists in power, I think open data day at the IRS is really not bad.

LOL. You're not even an American. He's a tip: U.S. states with the highest GDP per capita are mostly run by Democrats[1] (who, by the way, aren't leftists).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

I imagine this will make the "information wants to be free" people happy but, as I am not one of them, jesus christ. These are not serious people.

Information wants to be free in the same sense that hot air wants to be rising. More of a truism than a license to all the things.

> Information wants to be free in the same sense that hot air wants to be rising

Except information left alone doesn’t become free, it degrades. It takes energy to preserve it in an accessible form. That, in turn, tends towards making it very much not free.

That was an analogy to explain the simile. Homily? Anyhow, we're personifying information to make a statement on how people communicate. People naturally want to share information. We self-organize around the idea.

> People naturally want to share information. We self-organize around the idea.

Except we don’t. We heavily filter and censor what we share for a variety of reasons. When people freely share their every thought you get Twitter, not civilisation.

Ah, more bright ideas by people who have zero idea how the system they are destroying works.

I would like to protest my assignment to this timeline.

It's a shame this is what's happening instead of:

Substantive tax reform

Thorough tax enforcement

Making all tax filings public

"We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off."

"We're making the mother of all omelettes here, can't fret over every egg!"

> "We're making the mother of all omelettes here, can't fret over every egg!"

At nearly US$ 6/dozen:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111

yes, Americans can. :)

If this was done two years ago HN would be talking about how great it is.

If this was two years ago the headline would’ve said USDS, not DOGE.

Could anything have changed since then?

> HN would be talking about how great it is

If it were happening two years ago it would have used dummy data. USDS wasn’t known for committing crimes the way almost everyone at DOGE has.

Who is doing something, and how they're doing it, can be as important as what is being done.

I can confidently say I, and pretty much every other engineer I know would have been categorically opposed to having a hackathon to rip out and replace IRS systems no matter who was doing it.

Techies like those of us on HN understand the difference between safety critical systems and throwing ideas at the wall in a startup.

If this was being done in a careful methodical fashion, with deep care given to data integrity and security I'd support it regardless of whose doing it. This 30 day move fast and break things would be bad from Biden, Obama, or in a better timeline Bernie.

They might be flying too close to the sun on this one. A lot of the IRS' "inefficiency" is intentional, so it can be abused by moneyed interests to evade tax without anyone noticing.

Fixing those inefficiencies would bring this problem to light and force them to deal with it. While it's not past the current administration to formally legalize it, it's still "stirring shit" for no good reason and worse than leaving things as-is where the evasion falls through the cracks.

lol no. Your opinion is based on the assumption DOGE is actually making things more efficient. It is not.

> moneyed interests to evade tax without anyone noticing

If the people tasked with 'noticing' are being laid off indiscriminately, what do you think is going to happen with tax evasion?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com