More from the article ...

... News of the IRS's plan came from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a House Appropriations Committee hearing Tuesday to discuss the Treasury's budget proposal. (The IRS is a subsidiary of the Treasury.) When asked by Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-MD) whether proposed reductions in the IRS's IT budget, along with plans to cut additional staff, would affect the agencies ability to collect tax revenue, Bessent said it wouldn't, thanks to the current "AI boom."

"I believe through smarter IT, through this AI boom, that we can use that to enhance collections," Bessent told Hoyer and the Committee (24:29 into the video linked above). "I expect collections would continue to be very robust as they were this year."

Bessent's comments didn't explain how the IRS intends to deploy AI. Given how much it has slashed its enforcement staff since Trump took office, the agency definitely needs to do something.

The Treasury Inspector General's office issued a report last week on IRS workforce reductions as of March indicating that more than 11,000 IRS employees (approximately 11 percent of the Service's workforce) had been terminated since Trump's Office of Personnel Management began directing government agencies to cut jobs.

Revenue agents, whose job it is to audit tax returns for accuracy, made up the bulk of those fired.

Those cuts affected 31 percent of the IRS's revenue agent workforce. Revenue officers, who are responsible for collecting delinquent taxes, were the second-most slashed position, with 18 percent of collections officials at the IRS fired during the layoffs. ...