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Re:IRS to Begin Trial of Its Own Free Tax-Filing System by akira2501 on Saturday January 06, 2024 @02:58PM (#38894814)
Precisely. They'll spend $80b to hire "agents." They won't spend a time to make the system actually easy to use. They're not underfunded, they're just incompetent.
Re:IRS to Begin Trial of Its Own Free Tax-Filing System by actuallyalys on Saturday January 06, 2024 @03:04PM (#38894869)
There's certainly room to debate how the IRS is spending its money, but they've spent some of it on responding to taxpayer questions, resulting in a decrease in wait times and other improvements: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1421. These are their own metrics, so it's possible they're being gamed in some way, but it's not true no money is going toward helping taxpayers.
Re:IRS to Begin Trial of Its Own Free Tax-Filing System by atombender on Sunday January 07, 2024 @09:21AM (#38901373)
Not quite. Of the $79B, $46B was earmarked tax law enforcement, while $4.8B is designated tax processing modernization, including a plan to replace the current legacy systems (IMF and others that are written in a combination of COBOL and assembly language and that run on 1960s mainframes against IBM VSAM data files, and which the IRS have been trying to replace since the 1990s) by 2028. That money is supposed to be spent that way, and the IRS have to get approval from Congress' House and Senate Appropriations Committee (and TIGTA, Office of Management and Budget, and GAO must all sign off on each request) for all their expenses.

I won't disagree that their IT woes seem to be in large part due to incompetence, however.