Billions going to staffing but I’m not seeing any for upgrading computer systems. For years we hear about 100 refunds going to same address and other fraud situations.
How does IRS not have upgraded, red flag computer systems in this day and age.
One year got letter from IRS saying we owed money I called. I was on the phone for 1.5 hrs. She kept asking me if I ever owned a business. I told her no. Some how my account was flagged as owning a business and showing money owed. It got resolved and we didn’t own anything. It was an anal probe of my tax returns for many years. But yet, they send 100’s of refunds to the same address in our capital city of my state (was in the news).
“Billions going to staffing but I’m not seeing any for upgrading computer systems.”
The funding does include a few billion for upgrading computer systems.
The problem is that the systems are so antiquated that the overhaul will be incredibly complex and difficult since almost nobody is still around who understands the old systems.
Here is an anecdote from another government agency I was familiar with....
One day a thirty five year veteran lady retired.
She was the supervisor of a very obscure corner of a federal agency—so obscure that nobody else knew how to do her job.
It took one year after she left before the &^$% started to hit the rotating blades.
The computer system from the 1960s got 99% of the transactions correct without human intervention.
What nobody knew at the time was that this woman had been doing manual overrides of the system on the 1% of transactions that the computer system &^%$ed up.
The letters of complaint started to hit the agency after a few months and get sent to the obscure office where she used to work.
The workers had no clue what to do with them—so they stuck them on the bottom of their pile of work and ignored them!
It took several years and millions of dollars to design a “fix”—and my sources told me that there were other little “glitches” that were one tenth of one percent of transactions that still were not fixed—because nobody on site even knew what they were.
You can throw all the money and bodies you want at the problem—but if you lack the true expertise all you get is chaos.