For those of you happy about IRS firing 6,000 people... please understand how this works.

95% of the issues with the IRS - and frustration from dealing with them - come from computers.

Every filed tax return is eventually checked - usually many months after filing - by a computer system. Generally this system looks for two types of things, and dependent on this, the system takes different steps.

1) The system flags something as not "looking right". Perhaps a deduction looks too large relative to income, or doesn't seem right for the type of income you have. This will get sent to a human, who will then decide whether to audit you or not. Cutting workers will slow down this but I would argue that may be taxpayer friendly... before the audit starts. If the audit happens, then having an overworked auditor is not good for you... as they are more likely to reject your explanations so they can push the case down the line. This is a very small percentage of issues.

2) The vast majority of problems come from what we call "matching" notices. The IRS, based on third party information, thinks you may have overreported deductions or more likely underreported income. These are flagged by the computer, and these notices often go out WITHOUT a human ever looking at them. Anyone that has ever received a notice like this knows the computer assumes you are wrong, and until a human tells the computer you are not wrong, the computer will comtinue to more aggressively tell you that you are wrong... and will eventually take steps to take refunds and levy bank accounts. Again, in many cases, this is done with little or no human interaction.

So let's say you get one of these notices. You say, this is BS, and respond with proof the notice is wrong. Great. You mail it in. Because of IRS layoffs, that notice sits in a pile, waiting to be opened and read, perhaps for months. But no one tells the computer you responded, so the computer thinks by ignoring it, you are agreeing with it, and the comptuer starts to take more aggressive steps to collect.

This was a MASSIVE problem during COVID, until finally the IRS unplugged the computer for a while to give the humans time to catch up. It took them a very long time to catch up.

If Musk wants to really help here, when he fires the 6,000 people, he needs to unplug the computer for a while.