A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

Re:A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers al... by Terretta on Friday February 10, 2023 @07:36AM (#34738851)

$187M = $37M per year

At average FAANG salaries with overhead (benefits, space, equipment both desk and datacenter/cloud, internal workplace support functions like Recruiting, IT, HR, ER, DEI...) that's 60 people.

That's not many when dealing with multiple massive counterparties. You'll see ratios of non-dev to dev easily 10:1 to 30:1.

Yes, they could genuinely spend $187M so far on a project accomplishing only 2 devs x 5 years worth of work and rework.

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Re:A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers al... by jrochkind1 on Friday February 10, 2023 @09:10AM (#34739745)

That's actually good perspective,thanks!

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Re:A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers al... by welshwelsh on Saturday February 11, 2023 @02:12PM (#34755286)

Also consider the cost per taxpayer. At $187 million that's roughly $1 per person. For someone making the average income, it costs them maybe $0.15 in taxes for ID.me.

The IRS estimated that the average taxpayer spends $240 and 13 hours of time on their taxes. Multiply by 157 million taxpayers and that's $37 billion and 2 billion hours of labor. Although likely skewed by a small % who hire professionals, plenty of people spend $100+ on services like TurboTax.

The IRS spending a couple billion to make the tax process a little bit easier is really not a big deal. $187 million is nothing, and if that's all it costs to streamline their ID verification process, then it means the government is much more efficient with our tax dollars than people give it credit for.

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Re:A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers al... by jjfoooo4 on Friday February 10, 2023 @11:41AM (#34742040)

Simple to use != simple to make is so often a hard fact to keep in mind when looking at these numbers

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