A great time to cheat on your taxes

I didn’t want to say this before tax season ended, but my guess is this has to be the best time in all the history of the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service to cheat on your taxes.

(Not that anyone should cheat, of course. They definitely shouldn’t; taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society, and all that.)

But think about it: The IRS, already weakened by a decade or more of budget cuts that saw their top talent bleeding away through attrition, has lost a tenth of its workforce in just the past few months, and now that tax season is over, all the fired employees who were held over until April 15 will actually be leaving. Its leadership is in shambles, with five commissioners in as many months, and the confirmation hearings for the man who is supposed to take on the job full-time only happening this week, as well as a number of senior leaders resigning over policy differences with the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency.

(Again, I’m not saying that you should cheat on your taxes — you definitely shouldn’t — but if you wanted to, purely hypothetically speaking, you could hardly pick a better time to do it.)

Audit rates, which were already ridiculously low, can only drop as experienced staff retire or are driven out, leaving no one to train new employees, which is fine because many of those new employees were themselves driven out right at the start of the current purge. Unless you fill out your return in human blood or ask for your refund to be direct-deposited to a numbered Swiss account, the likelihood of your being audited is almost negligible.

(Still, you totally should not cheat on your taxes.)

Now hypothetically, you might be worried that, even though there aren’t enough human staff to come after you, the IRS might be use technology to catch you, but all those staff cuts are hampering the agency’s IT projects too, and much of the money they were supposed to get from the Inflation Reduction Act to help improve their tech has been clawed back, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

(Seriously, though, please don’t cheat on your taxes.)

It’s just that it really does seem like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cheat. The one agency that can stop you — also the one that delivers almost all of the government’s revenue — has been hobbled so comprehensively that if you were actually planning to create an environment for tax evasion, you could hardly do better. It’s OK to talk about this now, of course, because tax season is over and it’s not like any of the people on extension would want to cheat, or like anyone would try to cheat on their quarterly estimates or on the payroll taxes their company is supposed to hand over because they thought the IRS was so weak it wouldn’t catch them.

No one would do that, right?