Tax chief pushes 'AI-first IRS' to get more out of agency's workforce - GovExec.com

An 'AI-first IRS' is what Frank Bisignano, the agency's chief executive, pitched to staff on Wednesday, which is the sort of phrase that sounds like a strategy right up until you recall that this particular agency has already shed more than a quarter of its headcount. Tens of thousands of jobs went last year under prior leadership, and 'prior leadership' is doing an enormous amount of quiet lifting in that sentence. Now the people still standing are being told that artificial intelligence will make them more productive — which, translated out of consultancy, means each of them will be doing the work of the colleagues who were shown the door. Congratulations on the promotion to load-bearing.

The hiring figures are the real punchline. The IRS fell short of its hiring goals for this year's filing season and managed slightly more than 4,000 hires — a rounding error against the tens of thousands who left. So the recruitment pipeline sputters, and the institutional answer is not to fix the pipeline but to rebrand the shortfall as modernity and call it a roadmap. 'AI-first' implies there's a well-resourced second and third; the evidence suggests first is the model, second is the remaining staff, and third is a hold message. You cannot train auditors by press release, but you can absolutely announce an 'AI-first' anything and get the same headline.

And who audits the machine? The same government that cannot staff a filing-season phone line. An agency processing returns with fewer humans and more models offers taxpayers an appeal route of roughly zero metres, staffed by a chatbot that is confident and wrong in equal measure. 'More productive' will be measured in headcount removed, not work done, and the AI-first IRS will be first at exactly one thing: deciding things at scale about people who have nowhere to take it. The all-staff meeting was Wednesday. Next April is not a metaphor.