One taxpayer's IRS problem led to some much larger questions about the agency

  Terry Gerton  Stephanie, let’s take politics out of this conversation. We haven’t really touched on it now, but I don’t want a political answer to this next question either. The IRS fundamentally exists to generate the money to operate the government, right? That’s what it’s about. It’s about money in and money out. And most Americans actually want to pay their taxes, right? Nobody wants to be a tax dodge. So when you think about how the IRS and the Trump administration are approaching just the basic responsibilities here, got to collect money in, got to put money out. What do you think is the management philosophy at work behind all of these changes?

Stephanie Mencimer That’s a really good question, because I don’t know that there is one. It’s really short-sighted. I think that people misunderstand how the IRS functions and what it does, and how competent a lot of the civil service really is. It’s a huge and unwieldy system with 330 million people covered through the IRS. And I think there are these ideas that there’s an easy technological fix for a lot of what the IRS does. And that’s just not true. You know, they were doing some fixes, actually, you know, a couple years ago, and trying to fix them, make some of these things work better. And, you, know, when you fire 40% of the IT department, that just can’t happen. So I don’t know what the management strategy is there. It doesn’t seem to really come from anything. It’s like nihilism, like this just idea that government is bad. And, you know, there are people who philosophically think that taxation is theft, and, you know, I think there are wealthy people who really hate the IRS and don’t want to have to pay taxes. And they’re the ones who often push to dismantle the parts of the enforcement system that would take a chunk out of their income. And so there are a lot of, you know, the IRS has a lot enemies, even though, it’s so central to democracy. I’d read somewhere a long time ago that I think it was Nelson Mandela when he first became president of a post-apartheid South Africa, one of the first things he did was to create a really functioning revenue service because he realized that you can’t have a functioning democracy if your government can’t work for people. And, you know, to put your agenda across and to work on things like equality and raising the standard of living for your residents. It’s all part of a fair and equitable tax administration, and people forget about that