Sept. 12, 2023 - Epoch Times
11:37
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The IRS has just put out a major statement to the entire country, warning Americans that, moving forward, the agency will now be using AI to crack down on tax-related enforcement. | |
| Meaning that as fun as it was to pay taxes and then have some federal bureaucrat decide whether you need to be audited or not, well, moving forward, it'll actually be decided by an AI machine, sort of like a tax GPT. Specifically, the Commissioner of the IRS, Mr. | |
| Danny Werfel, he said this as a part of a statement released just last Friday. | |
| There is a sea change taking place at the IRS in every aspect of our operations. | |
| The changes will be driven with the help of improved technology as well as artificial intelligence that will help IRS compliance teams better detect tax cheating, identify emerging compliance threats, and improve case selection tools to avoid burdening taxpayers with needless no-change audits. | |
| Now, this move towards AI, it requires a little bit of background, and it also requires you to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this video, as well as this vital information, can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
| Now, with that out of the way, the shift towards AI-based tax compliance, it comes as a direct result of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act that was signed into law by Joe Biden last August. | |
| Included in that particular law was around $80 billion that was earmarked to expand the IRS's budget over the next 10 years. | |
| Now, after the debt ceiling negotiations earlier this year between Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy, that $80 billion was pared down to $60 billion. | |
| Essentially, Congress was able to effectively claw back $10 billion per year for the years 2024 and 2025. | |
| But that, of course, still leaves a cool $60 billion for the IRS to play with. | |
| And while many people assumed that this would fund a small army of IRS enforcement agents, which still might be the case, but it now appears that a large chunk of this money is actually being funneled into ramping up the use of technology to collect taxes. | |
| In fact, the IRS, they released this document right here back in April, wherein they essentially outlined what they're going to be doing with the money that's coming to them from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. | |
| That document, by the way, was a cool 150 pages long. | |
| And in it, they reference the fact that a significant chunk of the money that's being pumped into the IRS is going to be used to give it a technological facelift, or as they refer to it as, quote, Now, in this very lengthy plan of theirs, the IRS focused mostly on the customer service aspects of this technology boost, things like introducing chatbots, different online portals, as well as automated responses to commonly asked questions. | |
| However, this plan of theirs, it also explicitly says that the IRS expects the technology-driven enforcement to boost tax collection as well as government revenue. | |
| And so again, back in April, this was released as just a plan. | |
| But now, well, we're starting to see the execution of this plan come to fruition. | |
| According to the IRS, they will now begin to use AI tools to crack down on American taxpayers. | |
| Specifically, according to IRS estimates, Americans pay around 85% of the total taxes that they owe, with the difference between what is owed and what is actually paid, known as the tax gap. | |
| And in terms of how much money is represented by this tax gap, well, according to IRS estimates, between the years of 2014 and 2016, the annual tax gap was around $496 billion. | |
| That's $496 billion per year, which, for your reference, is equivalent to around 50,000 tanks that we could be sending over to Ukraine every single year, if only people would pay their taxes. | |
| And so, in order to get this money to fund these Ukrainian tanks as well as everything else, well, the IRS is now stepping up and beginning to deploy these artificial intelligence tools in order to find the people who aren't paying their taxes. | |
| And in order to do this effectively, Besides using your tax forms, your 1099s, and so on, well, the IRS will use three main sources of taxpayer data to pull from and to feed into their AI tool. | |
| The first is your previous tax returns, in order to establish patterns. | |
| The second is publicly available data. | |
| And so, for instance, if you happen to be in a music band, they can scan your social media accounts to see how many concerts you play at every single year and compare the number of concerts to the stated income on your tax returns to see whether they line up. | |
| And thirdly, the IRS can purchase third-party data about you from different data brokers out there. | |
| As an example of what that looks like in practice, back in the year 2020, quote, a government contract with the company Chainalysis is described, perhaps clumsily, as a contract for pilot IRS cryptocurrency tracing. | |
| This type of contract gives the IRS information related to otherwise untraceable income sources so that agents can detect on the reporting. | |
| And so using your tax forms, your previous tax returns, your publicly available data, as well as the private data that they're able to purchase about you from third-party data brokers, the IRS can feed all this information into their AI tool and make a prediction as to whether you are skimming in your taxes and whether an audit is necessary. | |
| But if you think all this sounds rather dystopian, well, fear not. | |
| Because in their statement, the IRS made a special point to mention that these new AI bots will only be used to target the very wealthy. | |
| As part of the new enforcement crackdown, The tax agency said that it would prioritize cases involving taxpayers earning over $1 million, but with recognized tax debt of more than $250,000. | |
| Which all sounds well and good, like it doesn't really apply to you, until you remember the fact that back in the year 1913, when personal income taxes first began in this country, well, it was only the very wealthy that were taxed, at a tax rate of about 1%. | |
| And then you fast forward 100 years, and now everyone pays taxes at a rate of about 25%. | |
| And so when the IRS says that they've spent millions of dollars developing an AI tool to help audit Americans, but don't worry because they're only going to be auditing the wealthy Americans, Well, perhaps you should consider remaining extremely skeptical of that. | |
| Regardless, the IRS also mentioned in the statement that they released last Friday that the deployment of these AI tools has already helped them to, quote, identify 1,600 or so millionaires who owe hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, as well as helping the agency to flag and open investigations into 75 of the largest partnerships in the United States, each with over $10 billion in assets on average. | |
| But this push towards AI gets a lot deeper, which we'll get into right after I introduce the sponsor of today's episode by showing you this little piece of money. | |
| Or rather, I should say that this is fake money being printed into oblivion by those geniuses over in Washington, DC. And so before they completely obliterate your life savings, what I recommend you do is to convert that fake money into real money, which is physical gold and silver. | |
| And the best company to use is the sponsor of today's episode, American Hartford Gold, who also happens to be my own personal gold and silver bullion dealer. | |
| They have thousands of other five-star ratings across the country. | |
| They have an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau. | |
| They ship quickly directly to your doorstep. | |
| Their product listings are awesome. | |
| They're stacked with great options of gold and silver, bullion and coins. | |
| And they have amazing customer service. | |
| When you pick up the phone and call them, you feel good knowing you support a company that supports the truth getting out into the wider American audience. | |
| And so calling them up is a no-brainer. | |
| But best of all, if you tell them that Roman sent you, they will throw in up to $5,000 worth of free silver with your first purchase. | |
| It's 866- And so the gears of the system appear to already be turning. | |
| Furthermore, besides this new tax GPT tool, the IRS is also using the additional money that's allocated to them through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act to bolster their ranks and get more actual boots on the ground. | |
| While the IRS's new enforcement plan makes no mention of additional staffing, the $60 billion in extra funding has already bolstered the IRS's ranks substantially, with hiring up around 13% over the past year, hitting a decade high of nearly 90,000 employees. | |
| The IRS has said earlier it plans to hire 20,000 people over the next two years, with around one-third of them earmarked for tax enforcement. | |
| Meaning, in practical terms, that in the coming years, once we file our taxes, the federal government's AI tools who go through our numbers will have sufficient boots on the ground if they find that we're not in compliance. | |
| Very cool. | |
| If you'd like to go through the IRS's full statement, or anything else that we discussed in today's episode regarding this new push towards AI tax enforcement, I'll throw all my research notes down into the description box below this video for you to peruse at your own leisure. | |
| And then lastly... | |
| You might not know this, but on the very same day that Joe Biden was sworn into office by some magical cosmic coincidence, on that very same day, YouTube made the decision to demonetize our channel. | |
| Since January 10th of 2021, we have not been able to run ads before, during, or after our program, the Super Chat feature has been disabled, and our reach on this platform has just nosedived. | |
| Now, every few months, on the back end, I appeal their decision. | |
| And for the past three years, that appeal has always been rejected. | |
| The reason for the rejection is always the same, is that some channel associated with our account has grossly violated YouTube's policy. | |
| They never tell us which channel, which piece of content, and which specific YouTube policy. | |
| And furthermore, every single one of our channels receives the very same message, meaning that every channel gets denied monetization because the system claims one of the other channels violated the content policy. | |
| It's beautiful how this kind of soft censorship actually works. | |
| Also, last week I learned that YouTube has in fact been running ads in front of some of my episodes. | |
| For instance, multiple people told me that this episode right here had pre-roll ads play in front of it. | |
| And that is frankly amazing. | |
| Because for one, we don't get any money from those ads because we're denied monetization. | |
| But then secondly... | |
| YouTube claims that we're denied monetization because our channel is not advertiser-friendly, and so they don't give us any money. | |
| But they still run ads on our content. | |
| They just don't pay us for it. | |
| It's almost like they're trying to use the purse strings to control what we do and do not say. | |
| Regardless, if you'd like to support the journalism that we do here at the Epoch Times, if you would like to support all of our work, well, the best way is to subscribe. | |
| And in fact, this month, we've extended our awesome sale and subscriptions. | |
| Just 25 cents a week for the whole year, which, if you do the math, works itself out to just be a single dollar a month. | |
| And so if you're not sure about whether you want to subscribe or not, maybe the paywall on the website is getting annoying, but you're 100% sure that you're looking for a source of honest news, well, perhaps take the sale as an opportunity to try the Epoch Times for yourself. | |
| That way, you can access all the phenomenal content that we put out there, the documentaries, We're good to go. | |
| I'll throw a link to the sale page. | |
| It'll be right there at the very top of the description box below. | |
| You can just click on that link, head on over to the sale page where you can subscribe and try the Epic Times yourself for just a single dollar a month. | |
| I'm sure you'll love it. | |
| Now, of course, you can cancel any time, but I'm sure that you won't. | |
| I'm sure that you'll be a subscriber for a long time to come. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. |
Export Selection