Richard Rubin

and they want to reduce it another thousand or two.

And it's sudden.

We can't show charts on a podcast.

But, you know, you see this steady uptick of IRS employees, and then it just drops in 2025.

So, yeah, it's a sudden reversal, unlike what we've seen.

The administration has really tried to keep the focus of the IRS and where they've protected it somewhat on the service side, on making sure that returns get processed, refunds go out, people can get phone calls answered.

That's been more of the priority.

The easier it is for a revenue agent to pull up past year's returns, comparable companies' returns,

any sort of information they can get.

The easier you make someone's job, the more efficient that's going to be.

And sometimes the IRS is bureaucratic and cumbersome, right?

So the more you can cut through, there's some real benefits to be gained from cutting through some of that.

And that's the basic idea, is that you can approximate...

the same level of work that you can get with poor people with fewer people.

They've got AI that they're starting to incorporate that's helping them be more efficient in deciding which cases to select for audit or for criminal investigations.

There are just fewer people around.

We've seen audits of really high-income people drop over the past year.

We've seen partnerships, complex hedge funds, private equity firms, the administration and the IRS a few years ago ramping up scrutiny, and then that's a cause.

And so we know that there's fewer people looking,

The administration's budget literally says, if you cut enforcement spending, there will be missed opportunities for the United States and lost revenue.