Upgrading IRS computers and funding the Agency

[Number Six]

It looks like there is an effort to increase the IRS budget, upgrading computers to modern capacity and hiring agents for customer service needs. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/busi ... -plan.html

How much would be needed for these upgrades?



I know of a lot of people at risk of audit or other trouble if state and federal tax agencies did their jobs.

Someone here years ago said that upgrading the computers would like doing construction work on a 747 while in flight. Former IRS commissioner Koskinen has said that is too much, others shared their opinions: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/busi ... -plan.html

[notorial dissent]

The comment of starting over from scratch and reinventing the wheel comes to mind. The IRS system is/was ancient of days years ago and hasn't improved any with the passing years.

[Famspear]

Someone here years ago said that upgrading the computers would like doing construction work on a 747 while in flight.

I remember seeing that comment, too.

I contend that the United States really does need a more up-to-date Internal Revenue Service -- with more modern equipment and more highly trained personnel.

[notorial dissent]

Someone here years ago said that upgrading the computers would like doing construction work on a 747 while in flight.

I remember seeing that comment, too.

I contend that the United States really does need a more up-to-date Internal Revenue Service -- with more modern equipment and more highly trained personnel.

Which is exactly true. The computers and programming the IRS relies upon is charitably ancient of days and is a system of patched and cobbled together equipment and programming that a programming friend of mine described as poorly documented at best. That it will ever happen is questionable at best as it would require "new" equipment newer than UIVAC and COCO and programming beyond COBOL. All of which cost money they can't get and aren't really willing to spend. If you'll recall, Congress cut back on the money needed to actually enforce the tax code, as in bodies to actually do anything, and the idea of them actually spending money to upgrade equipment becomes fantasy.

[The Observer]

In addition, IRS mismanaged several attempts at bringing about modernization of their system over the last 40 years or so. So much money was wasted in contracts with outside vendors who promised the moon and then failed to deliver.

[notorial dissent]

I 'm not sure "mismanaged " is far too mild a characterization from what I 've heard, more like active resistance to any kind of real change.

[The Observer]

No, believe me, there are or were too many executives in the IRS that are Peter Principle candidates.

[notorial dissent]

A friend of mine referred to it as life time job security.

[The Observer]

A friend of mine referred to it as life time job security.

I can't argue with that. At one time working for the US government was not desirable since the executives and managers wielded great power in being able to terminate any one if they wished. And of course this power was abused. In the end, the government allowed for collective bargaining, grievances, establishing an labor relations board and giving employees the ability to contest a proposed termination of employment in federal court. Not that these policies were horrible practices in and of themselves, but the entire collective weight of them coupled with incompetent/inexperienced management led to the current situation that it is almost impossible to fire an employee for reasons that would get them fired in the private sector.

Here are three situations that happened in an IRS federal office:

(1) An employee who made it a practice to sue any co-worker or manager in their building who had a disagreement with them. It did not matter whether the case this disgruntled employee was pursuing lacked merit or standing, they simply filed the suit as a way of harrassing the targeted person. The situation developed to the point that everyone, including their manager, avoided the employee and did not interact with them, including doing performance reviews, monitoring their attendance, or holding them accountable for their work.

(2) Another employee had a lingering conflict with another employee. The situation festered and escalated to the point that one day the two employees got into a yelling match which then devolved into a physical altercation. A person on the other side of the door where the fight was ongoing, came outside and attempted to intervene, only to receive a blow to the face from the first employee. Neither employee was removed from their job or disciplined, they were only moved to separate floors in the building. The person who got assaulted for intervening was an executive who was a division chief over them.

(3) An IRS employee who had a position in assisting taxpayers by providing answers on filing their returns and paying taxes was not filing their own returns as required - a direct violation of their ethical requirements to be employed. The reason for the employee not filing? They had decided that there was no law requiring them to file returns and had become a tax protester. After the manager had investigated and proposed termination, the employee filed a grievance. After the grievance was filed and went through the various levels of management, the termination was upheld. The employee then appealed the grievance to the FLRA. The FLRA arbitrator upheld the firing as well. The employee then took the case to the federal district court where the judge ruled that the government had to reinstate the employee, apparently since that was how the IRS dealt generally with non-compliant taxpayers.

[Burnaby49]

Not that these policies were horrible practices in and of themselves, but the entire collective weight of them coupled with incompetent/inexperienced management led to the current situation that it is almost impossible to fire an employee for reasons that would get them fired in the private sector.

Can't say it was much different in the Canada Revenue Agency although your examples are more extreme than any I've run across. You can't blame the IRS for number 3, that's on the courts.

I still remember one, vividly, from when I'd just joined the government back in 1972. A recently hired woman refused to work, did nothing at all. No matter what the government tried in the way of discipline or inducement she'd simply refuse to do any work. So they fired her for incompetence. She was reinstated after a grievance because an arbitrator decided that since she'd done no work the CRRA hadn't proven she was incompetent to do the work she hadn't done. I'd just started with the government a few month earlier and, when I read that, I realized I had a job for life if I wanted it.

[Number Six]

I'm sure the HR problems are generally worse in private businesses as I have seen especially as you go down the pay scale. The proverbial "Bartleby the Scrivener" wouldn't even be able to be fired these days especially in the covid 19 pandemic, the only way to have him dismissed were to be if he quit.

The IRS employee who was caught surfing porn during government hours, and every other case of problem conduct cited would be mere fly specks in the work record.

In a major national home improvement company I work at part time, no one gets fired except for blatantly sexual or racist conduct. The women can pat guys on the butt, not the other way around. Workers routinely come in late, or leave an hour or two early--no consequences. "We are in a worldwide emergency", normal rules don't apply.

Thefts keep growing fueling desperate people's need to get money for addictions. Hardware alone has over $2 million a year in the local store in thefts, the entire store loses over $7 million a year in thefts out of a $55 million or so gross. Suggestions on how to address the theft problem gets dismissed as against the company's philosophy toward having the most inviting commercial environment.

I have a friend who was a computer programmer helping the NY MTA with upgrading their computer system. He thought the $80 billion figure on all that was required to upgrade its systems and hire the necessary personnel to address the IRS dysfunctions as well as excessive. And he has given up all hope for political reform in the US due to a medical issue that nearly killed him wiping out most of his savings and wants to move to a country with universal health care. He thinks the proposed increases in the IRS budget would be ripe for featherbedding and favoritism with contracts.

[notorial dissent]

Your friend has a pretty accurate and apt assessment based on my sources.

[The Observer]

Your friend has a pretty accurate and apt assessment based on my sources.

Especially when Charles Rossotti, of American Management Systems, a tech information company, was named IRS Commissioner. The thought was that with a person who had expertise in building information systems in the private sector the IRS would finally be able to modernize theirs into a coherent configuration.

Never happened.

[LaVidaRoja]

No. His big idea was to re-organize the field operations in a way that did little to cut management positions an a lot to depress the morale of the rank-and-file. And he was proud of his accomplishments.

[The Observer]

That is not correct. At his nomination hearing he stated that he had two goals, of comprehensively modernizing the IRS and modernizing its technology.

As well, in several of the US senator's opening remarks the issue of updating the technology was something that they expected to happen under Rossotti's watch. This included Sen. Roth, the chairman, Sen. Kerrey and Sen. Moynihan.

The White House public announcement released by the press secretary, echoed that Mr. Rossotti would be expected to modernize the IRS to improve customer service and information technology.

Finally, Rossotti was not the first person to come up with the idea of reorganizing the IRS. That started in 1996, when the National Commission for Restructuring the IRS came into being - long before Rossotti was nominated for Commissioner. Rossotti had no choice but to reorganize the IRS in some way since Congress had passed legisalation requiring it as a result of the commission's report that recommended it.

[notorial dissent]

My impression of the IRS is that it is a monolithic structure of multitudinous semi-independent/semi-autonomous fiefdoms that have exactly no intention of giving up one jot of their real or imagined power and territory and thus no change can be imposed upon it. No bureaucrat is ever going to relinquish one jot of their imagine power.

[The Observer]

My impression of the IRS is that it is a monolithic structure of multitudinous semi-independent/semi-autonomous fiefdoms that have exactly no intention of giving up one jot of their real or imagined power and territory and thus no change can be imposed upon it. No bureaucrat is ever going to relinquish one jot of their imagine power.

It was certainly that way prior to the Roth hearings. At that point there were 33 districts, all of them self-sufficient in terms of having staff to manage the various functions of tax administration but also human resources (hiring, EEO, benefits, retirement), information systems (to one degree or another), and other departments that were duplicative. So a reorganization aimed at eliminating redundancies was a good thing, in terms of budget and consistency.

The worse problem was, as you noted above, that each district was run as a fiefdom and out of step with the IRS nation office program. As an example, in 1988 the Los Angeles District had a couple of scandals that blew up. One was with the CID chief decided to get involved in the Guess Jeans-Jordache Jeans business feud and took the side of Guess Jeans by launching a criminal investigation against Jordache; the fact that Guess Jeans had offered him a job certainly raised the issue of impropriety. And it didn't help that his boss, the District Director, dragged his feet in investigating the CID chief and resisting Congressmen's questions about the scandal. But that might have been because the director himself had been discovered conducting his own personal program with a tax attorney regarding to determine whether the attorney's clients could file overdue tax returns and avoid a criminal investigation. This consisted of the tax attorney putting the returns in question in a safety deposit box to which the director had a key for access. The director would go to the bank, review the return, and then let the attorney know whether the return would trigger an criminal investigation in the future. Of course, there was no such program anywhere else in the IRS that provided this kind of service and the director soon retired and escaped further investigation. A number of safety box deposit box keys were found in a desk in his vacated office.

It was escapades like this that drove Congress to start pushing the IRS to eliminate these fiefdoms and get some control over the executives. There have been several reorgs since the first one in 1998, and none of them have been perfect. There are still instances of executives being involved in some type of scandal (typically one of sexual harrassment or favortism based on sex with an employee) and I think Congress needs to focus more on the process of how executives are selected. There seems to be an insider network that rewards friendship and loyalty that gets people the nod rather than having experience, knowledge and ability. Given that in the private sector, socipathic behavior is well-represented in the executive ranks, I think it is quite possibly the rule in the IRS ranks as well.

[notorial dissent]

I 'd say good bet on all the above. My impression from what I 've told is that most of the "change" was largely cosmetic and the PTB simply worked around it. So lots of activity amounting in the end to very little actually changing, except maybe job titles and org charts. Bureaucracy at its finest.

[The Observer]

I 'd say good bet on all the above. My impression from what I 've told is that most of the "change" was largely cosmetic and the PTB simply worked around it. So lots of activity amounting in the end to very little actually changing, except maybe job titles and org charts. Bureaucracy at its finest.

I 'd say good bet on all the above. My impression from what I 've told is that most of the "change" was largely cosmetic and the PTB simply worked around it. So lots of activity amounting in the end to very little actually changing, except maybe job titles and org charts. Bureaucracy at its finest.

The first reorg revealed a problem with a form of stovepiping; the familiar bureaucratic excuse that "I can't solve that problem because there is another unit who has responsiblity and authority for that issue." This was a weakness that was rarely seen in the old district format since the director could step in and short-circuit the stonewalling. Another weakness was combining the field audit and collection functions into one unit, which resulted in managers with no background experience in a particular function (say, an exam chief) now having to manage employees and front-rank managers from another function. You can easily predict the problems that would arise from that format. Subsequent reorgs focused on trying to realign the work and workers with senior management and executives that "understood" the work. But typically the management was frequently rotated to other units, divisions or areas, either to keep the individual leaders from getting entrenched in one place, thereby establishing another fiefdom or to develop them for leadership roles for which they were "better suited" (usually the case was that the executive was really being kicked upstairs due to their personality issues, inability to control their temper or simpy being incompetent). The result was getting new and conflicting orders that superseded all previous orders and policies. That resulted in excessive meetings, training, and reviews to ensure that the new orders were being implemented.

The tragic thing was that for 90% of the IRS, there were (and are) employees and managers who knew the work and simply wanted to do a good job. They were not interested in the office politics, the ladder-climbing, and the manipulative games played by others to get power and control. All they wanted was to be able to come in, do their job, and go home, plus get a little deserved recognition from time to time. It is the other 10% that has given the IRS the bad reputation that it has.

We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization. - Charlton Ogburn, Jr.