17th
How many IRS agents does it take to…
From a recent Times post on the unsurprising complexity of IRS collection procedures:
Between 2002 and 2007, the I.R.S. sent more than 83 million first notices over about $444 billion in taxes. By the end of fiscal year 2007, $79.3 billion was collected, the report said.
That’s roughly 1 first notice per thousand delinquent dollars collected (not counting the various other higher-order ‘phases’ in the charming flowchart).
I’m wondering what the ratio of dollars spent to dollars collected would be here, and the GAO is apparently wondering the same thing. Economics suggests that they are operating at the point where the marginal cost of more-aggressive collection exceeds the marginal return, but no one can really say where that point is because the IRS is also suffering from a serious “lack of agencywide cost-benefit data and related performance measures”.
Government efficiency and accountability at its finest.
