Months after Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency stripped the Internal Revenue Service for parts and snagged as much taxpayer data as they could get their hands on, the agency is getting some support—just not from actual people. According to a report from Axios, the IRS is deploying AI agents for the first time across a number of the agency’s divisions. So get ready for your tax season questions to get answered by a bot.
Per the report, the IRS has tapped Salesforce to provide the AI support via its Agentforce platform. The AI agents will be jumping in to provide support in the Office of Chief Counsel, Taxpayer Advocate Services, and the Office of Appeals.
The Taxpayer Advocate Services division is an independent organization within the IRS that’s meant to help taxpayers resolve problems and recommend changes to the agency that will prevent problems. The Office of Appeals, also described as an independent organization, is meant to help resolve tax-related disputes without litigation. Both seem like areas you’d rather talk to a person, so let’s hope that the agents aren’t being deployed in a customer-facing capacity.
According to Axios, the Salesforce-provided agents are meant to “augment and supplement the work of these departments,” and they will be used for tasks like providing case summaries and searching documents. Paul Tatum, executive vice president of global public sector solutions at Salesforce, told the publication the company “doesn’t advocate for a blind AI processing tax returns without a human being involved in reviewing and supplementing it,” but also said it’s ultimately up to the agency how it decides to staff itself with AI agents.
The IRS could certainly use some support. It already lost over a quarter of its workforce thanks to cuts led by DOGE earlier this year and was the target of furloughs during the government shutdown that saw nearly half its workforce laid off. According to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IRS is down one-third of its tax auditors from its 2024 levels, which means it’s also down a significant source of revenue. According to an analysis from Better IRS, every $1 spent on auditing the top 0.1% of earners can return as much as $26 in tax revenue. Last year, the IRS estimated it was able to collect an additional $561 billion in unpaid and overdue taxes over the next decade with full funding.
Instead, it looks like the Trump administration will opt to let that money remain out there and instead try to cash in by replacing employees with AI and killing free file programs so people have to pay to file their taxes. We’ll see if the math works out.
Read the full article here
