And the IRS, with it's autonomous 1960s computers (vacuum tubes!) running COBOL 1, is in worse shape. A Center Director: "Our automated systems lose data routinely, the systems cannot apply the law; and the systems cannot consistently do arithmetic."
This insight resulted from a telephone call eventually transferred to this lady on the topic of a bill ("amount due; "owed"), stating in late 2018 that we had failed to report any income whatsoever for 2016. Having said we reorted no income, IRS also claimed we
had reported four totally different totals of income for 2016, each one allegedly incorrect. (IRS insists that their bills are only suggestions.
) In fact, we had reported not one of the claimed amounts and had reported our income correctly. A fifth communication from IRS said that we had overpaid, because IRS simply lost a $3,600 distribution for my 401K, a distribution reported to them by the 401K manager and reported with our 1040.
In the end, despite
five written staments from IRS officials that we owed nothing, the IRS computers would not stop grinding out threats, and we ran out of time to either pay or sue. We sued in U.S. Tax Court, and, when a trial date was set after ten more months, IRS voluntarily gave us an additional, trivial refund that we did not technically deserve and had not sought. (I regarded this check as very partial compensation for the expenses and hundreds of hours incurred fighting the IRS for two years.) The IRS proposed that the Court dismiss the case as "settled." The case was dismissed.
Don't blame the line employees. Congress in its general uselessness has refused for over thirty years to fund new computers or software and has cut their budget 7 out of the last eleven years, resulting in a loss of 1/3 of the IRS staff and leading to the defective automated systems running with no effective human oversight. Also, Congress keeps dumping more work on the steadily less-capable IRS: want to send out millions of "stimulus checks"? Have IRS do it. They are running years behind processing returns, leading to bills routinely sent to recapture refunds paid without actual processing of returns, as in our case: billed us for underreporting 2016 19 months after sending our correct refund.
"Artificial intelligence"is a strange term to apply to psychotic, sociopathic computers.
