re: Here's where all of that new IRS money is going

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Supposedly, they're hiring 87,000 people who can
Pass a pre-employment drug test.
Pass a pre-employment tax examination.
Be legally allowed to carry a firearm.
Work a minimum of 50 hours per week, which may include irregular hours, and be on-call 24/7, including holidays and weekends.
Maintain a level of fitness necessary to effectively respond to life-threatening situations on the job.
Be willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.

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You're forgetting a huge one there. Must be no older than 37 which eliminates a huge portion of your existing experienced law enforcement guys out there. So your pool just shrank, yugely.

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Supposedly, they're hiring 87,000 people who can
Pass a pre-employment drug test.
Pass a pre-employment tax examination.
Be legally allowed to carry a firearm.
Work a minimum of 50 hours per week, which may include irregular hours, and be on-call 24/7, including holidays and weekends.
Maintain a level of fitness necessary to effectively respond to life-threatening situations on the job.
Be willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.

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So, CPA meets plant operator (with the schedule) meets cop. Good luck, IRS.

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Sounds like they'll be busting your door down if you fail to declare the $300 your wife made on the garage sale.

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Makes perfect amount of sense to me. Hammer me for $300 and spend 87,000 times whatever shitty salary they're offering to get it back.

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You “despise” like a third of Americans? That is sad

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Not really.

Ignoring the enforcement spending issue, because that’s fruitless here

But

The IRS needs to have people to answer the phones and resolve issues. Waiting on hold for hours to resolve minor things is not acceptable. Since they are putting money into it, the experience better improve, however I won’t hold my breath.

There’s also a chance all this immediately goes away in 2 years, as that is the state of things these days.

It’s not so much a “democrats vs. republicans” issue as much as it’s a “people who choose to work in government work in government because they’re pre-disposed to some combination of extreme narcissism, self-righteousness, and tendency toward job security and personal corruption” issue. Their priority, like most people, is either preserving or improving their position, and government does that almost entirely by expanding itself and exploiting private citizens.

Thank god for our elected representatives who are fighting for us by passing complicated and convoluted tax laws and then publicly bashing the agency in charge of collecting those taxes. What a win-fricking-win.

But wait, there's more! President Bush wanted the IRS to develop “an easy, no-cost option for taxpayers to file their tax return online.” This would have made life easier for millions of Americans and save the government money (less needed to fund the fricking IRS). But noooo, companies like H&R block and Intuit (Turbo Tax) would stand to lose billions.

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But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.

For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it.

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TurboTax is not free, fa-free,free

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Work a minimum of 50 hours per week,

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Yeah right. If posting on book face and playing fantasy sports counts as work.

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Pass a pre-employment drug test.

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Why does this matter? I know people holding pretty high security clearances who have worked in government for 20+ years and haven't taken a single drug test, not even before being hired in their first government job.

not sure if anyone remembers this, but they wasted $140 million on upgrading their computer systems and didnt even finish the job. While our information sat vulnerable.

frick the IRS.

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The IRS was unable to upgrade all of its Windows workstations from Windows XP and all of its Windows servers from Windows Server 2003 by the Microsoft end of life deadlines. At the conclusion of our fieldwork, the IRS had not accounted for the location or migration status of approximately 1,300 workstations and upgraded only about one-half of its Windows servers from the 2003 software version to the 2008 release. Since April 2011 when the IRS initially started the Windows workstation upgrade project, the IRS spent approximately $128 million to upgrade its Windows workstations and expects to spend an additional $11 million through the end of Fiscal Year 2015. TIGTA found that the IRS did not follow established policies over project management and provided inadequate oversight and monitoring of the Windows XP upgrade early in its effort.

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Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows XP in April 2009. Two years later, in April 2011, the IRS signed the project charter to begin the process for upgrading to Windows 7. However, the IRS did not actually begin upgrading workstations until September 2012. Microsoft announced that extended support for Windows XP would be discontinued in April 2014. IRS contracted with Microsoft to provide continued support for one additional year beyond this deadline. Figure 1 provides the timeline of the IRS’s Windows 7 upgrade project.

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the IRS also informed us that there are approximately 1,300 workstations that, according to their inventory records, are still running an outdated operating system. Project managers responsible for the upgrade could not confirm this number because they cannot locate these workstations and the inventory system is not accurate.[2] IRS management stated that with an enterprise-wide initiative this large and the complexity of its environment, it is unreasonable to expect 100 percent of the workstations to be migrated without collaboration with other key Information Technology delivery partners assisting during the clean-up period. We believe that running workstations with outdated operating systems pose significant security risks to the IRS network and data, particularly in the environment where a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. External hackers or malicious insiders need to locate only the one computer with security weaknesses, such as one with an outdated operating system, to exploit in order to steal data or further compromise other computers.

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Imagine one of these auditors coming to you and you saying oh i cant find these assets, our inventory system isnt up to date.