Two Agencies With A Similar Problem

      From an article in the New York Times:

… The Trump administration has held up the publication of an annual Internal Revenue Service estimate of unpaid taxes, a delay that could mask the fiscal cost of the steep decline in the agency’s ability to audit the rich. 

The I.R.S. has long published an estimate of the tax gap, the amount of tax owed under existing law that goes uncollected each year.  … 

The shift comes after the Trump administration pushed out roughly a quarter of the I.R.S. work force and cut the agency’s budget, weakening the government’s ability to conduct time-intensive audits.  … 

The absence of an updated tax gap estimate is part of a pattern across the Trump administration, which has either stopped collecting or sought to change the measurement of federal data that scientists and other researchers have long relied on for a rigorous, unvarnished understanding of the country.  … 

An I.R.S. spokesman said the agency was updating the methodologies used to calculate the tax gap and would release the figure when it was ready. Mr. Bisignano, in a statement, said revenue from tax enforcement was increasing this year and did not depend on the number of auditors. … 

“Without a metric of the tax gap that is telling us in real time about trends in compliance and how they’re changing, I worry that it’s hard for policymakers to see the full swath of the damage that’s been done by the gutting of the agency,” said Natasha Sarin, a Treasury official during the Biden administration who has written extensively about the tax gap. “And, in fact, I worry that’s the point.” …  

In appearances before Congress in the spring, Mr. Bisignano, the first chief executive officer of the I.R.S., suggested that he was skeptical of the methodology behind the tax gap, saying that he wanted to focus on the subset of unpaid taxes that the I.R.S. could realistically collect. …

     Sound familiar? Cut staff to the point an agency cannot fulfill its core responsibilities, refuse to release statistics showing how bad things have gotten and try to come up with your own tortured statistics making it look as if things aren’t as bad as they really are. Bisignano is at the helm of two agencies doing this but it sounds like the problem is government wide.