Waste at the IRS
Posted by richrobinson 8 years, 6 months ago to The Gulch: General
This may seem small but yesterday we received a letter at work from the IRS telling us they had changed our mailing address. It listed our old address and said it would be changed to the new one. The next letter we opened was also from the IRS and it had our new address on it. The letter was sent to confirm that they would now start using that address. Two nearly identical letters sent in two different envelopes. Why not just list the old and new address in one letter. I hate inefficiency. What sucks is the only change is our street is now called a Road and not an Avenue.
your money.
Stone-age thinking... the best thinking we're allowed to by... by them.
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They have to spend money from there budget every year to get the same money the next year, if they don’t spend the money, they get docked during the next fiscal year. What happens is the internal departments all work together to find ways to spend your cash. Money gets pushed around from department to department until it’s all gone and no one can think of anything else they could possible buy. All of this is to ensure that they get the same amount or more next year so they can do it all over again, with your cash.
I worked for the Bureau of Land Management as a contractor in Information Technology initially then as a government employee. Many times I protested that we shouldn’t spend money on useless equipment just to deplete the budget. As you know, the computer industry moves quick, many times they purchased equipment and let it just sits until it’s worthless.
A simple solution is to put the services that these departments provide out to bid and make the government bid on providing its own services. Of course, lowest bidder wins. This will never happen but I wish…
Case in point, I used to sell personal computers to companies and I responded to purchase bids all of the time. One particular bid was for a large electric company in my area which just built a new campus and needed to furnish the facility with new computers. They submitted a bid that was extremely tight for once specific module of HP computer with a specified hard drive size and ram. I was not only able to win the bid for my company but save the utility company hundreds of thousands of dollars by submitting a bid response that included that exact model but with third party hard drives and RAM.
My point is, the bid and bid response process allows for innovation…
By the way, I second your experience of the frustration of the baseline budgeting process and its disincentives to plan and save. Glad to have moved on.
In either of these cases you probably would have received only one notice! Go figure.
The few times that I received an IRS letter, I had to have a drink before opening them. So far so good!