Tax cheats, rejoice: The IRS can't afford to track you down
For a member of Congress looking to boost his or her public profile, there are plenty of options for grabbing a little positive media coverage – kissing babies and eating fried things on sticks at state fairs pop to mind. But elected officials looking for the biggest bang for their buck often turn their attention elsewhere.
After all, not everybody likes babies, and an increasing number of Americans are now health-conscious enough to consider things like deep-fried butter at least somewhat alarming. But almost everybody hates the Internal Revenue Service.
For that reason, beating up on the IRS has become something approaching a reflex for politicians, including a number of high-profile presidential candidates, like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who regularly promises to eliminate the agency if he wins the Oval Office.
While the constant political attacks may seem like harmless posturing, the fact is that the IRS serves the rather vital function of making sure the federal government has money to pay its bills, and years of legislative chipping away at its capabilities, accelerated in the wake of the targeting scandal that followed the 2012 elections, have made it exceedingly difficult for the agency to perform even its most basic function: making sure Americans pay the taxes that Congress has voted into law.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen hammered that point home this week in a speech before the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, revealing that the agency is now so low on manpower that there is a less than 1 percent chance that a given tax return will be checked for accuracy.
“The IRS completed about 1.2 million individual audits in fiscal 2015,” Koskinen said on Tuesday. That’s 13,700 less than the previous year. Even more disturbing, the decline in audits in 2015 was not a one-year aberration. The number for 2015 was 350,000 below five years ago. That’s a drop of 22 percent, and corresponds exactly to the number of revenue agents, which is also down 22 percent since 2010.”
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The Federal government is way behind with respect to much technology.
I know one agency is still paying Microsoft for Windows XP support. I suppose they don't have the resources to upgrade so they get a contract to support what they still have in place as it slowly fades away into the past. 
