New funding is insufficient to solve this problem. Only a total tax overhaul would ensure IRS effectiveness
Crook 22, Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board (“The IRS doesn't need more money. America needs a simpler tax code,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2022/08/29/inflation-reduction-act-us-tax-code-compliance-complicated-burden-clive-crook/stories/202208260003)//BB
The U.S. tax code hasn’t been comprehensively simplified since 1986. Over the subsequent years, Congress has indulged its unlimited appetite for making it unintelligible. Back in 2010, a panel chaired by Paul Volcker reported that taxpayers and businesses spend 7.6 billion hours and “significant out-of-pocket expenses” to do their taxes each year, a cost equivalent to at least $140 billion. That was 12 times the IRS budget or 10 cents per dollar of income tax paid. What a mess. And what a shame that the new IRS budget isn’t part of a plan to fix it. In a narrow sense, the extra spending does make sense. My colleague Tyler Cowen argues that the IRS is badly run and should be told to smarten up before it gets more money — a fair point, given the agency’s failure to modernize its systems and make better use of its existing resources. But the squeeze on its budget (a cut of about a fifth in real terms since 2010) and the relentless rise in its workload (lately aggravated by the pandemic) would test any undertaking, especially one that was stressed to begin with.