The Internal Revenue Service, everyone’s favorite tax collector, is facing deep budget cuts — but don’t get too excited. The agency has a bold new plan to audit more of the little people while hiring as few of them as possible.
The agency plans to replace the nearly 30,000 employees it lost to Trump administration cuts with a new army of auditors, one that doesn’t sleep. I’m talking about artificial intelligence, which the IRS has identified as a top priority in its new budget request.
Documents I obtained show that the IRS already has a powerful set of tools to force compliance, from undercover agents to wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance. The collaborates with ICE to monitor the travel of American citizens through. But now, thanks to AI, the IRS’s ultimate goal is for “minimal human contact,” as one document put it.
The centerpiece is Palantir software that allows IRS investigators and auditors to conduct “near real-time data analysis” through a custom tool called the “Selection and Analytic Platform,” or SNAP.
What that means in practice is that millions of middle-income Americans who once fell below the threshold of what scarce human auditors could manage are now within reach. The little guy just became a lot easier to monitor at scale.
The big guy? Not so much.
The budget cuts gutting the IRS’s human workforce were largely engineered by Elon Musk and his DOGE crusade. The beneficiaries are obvious: billionaires who use entirely legal means — offshore trusts, shell companies — to pay little or nothing in taxes. These structures are largely impervious to the IRS’s tools, AI or otherwise. Your cash tips and side hustles are not.
Happy Tax Day!
Help me pay my taxes by subscribing
— Edited by William M. Arkin
From Ken Klippenstein via This RSS Feed.