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Lerner, fears enraged public, wants IRS testimony sealed

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  • Younggun

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    I'm doing my best to remain open minded, but I've not been convinced that she deserves any special treatment or protections.

    I'm also not convinced that the sealed testimony contains nothing incriminating or she feels ashamed. Would she have any regret if none of this had come to light? I have my doubts. Though I'm sure she regrets it now.

    Too many times we are told beurocrats are just stuck in a bad system, they were just going along with it and had no choice, etc.

    Remorse for something you've done is not the same as remorse for getting caught doing something.
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    benenglish

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    What's to prevent a criminal from filing an amended return anytime after the initial?
    Nothing except the fact that it's not profitable. Initial returns, unless they send up certain red flags, are accepted at face value. Amended returns are handled in a much more manual fashion; most get looked at by a real human being before the action sought by the amended return is taken.
    ... the people building the system have to be smarter than the criminals...
    They generally are. However, just like security holes in computer software, the people building the system don't just have to be smarter, they have to be perfect. The Internal Revenue Code requires they do millions of things and they have designed thousands of systems to accomplish those tasks. 99.99% of those systems don't break but the bad guys only have to find one problem in one system to exploit.

    Humans aren't perfect so they can't build large, complex systems that have zero flaws. The best they can do is try to fix things when the problems are pointed out. Off the cuff, I'd say if the IRS hadn't massively improved its SSN verification on filed returns over the last 15 years, literally most Americans wouldn't get their refunds. It's a constantly-escalating war that the IRS has fought tooth and nail for over 20 years.

    But, as always, the bad guys just have to find one flaw and innocent taxpayers are plunged into a nightmare. I feel for those folks. And nobody feels for those folks more than the people at the IRS who feel personally insulted by the criminals who mis-use their systems to hurt innocent people.
    ...which generally doesn't happen with gov't employees, ...
    Please be fair. There are plenty of brilliant people who are government employees.
    ...what is their motivation even if they are smarter?
    Take your pick from among the many thousands of motivations that anyone, in or out of government, has to spur them on to better work. Government employees are people just like everyone else and have the same motivations to do a good job as anyone else. And like everyone else, sometimes they succeed brilliantly, sometimes you wonder how they learned to tie their shoes, and most of them fall somewhere in between.
     

    benenglish

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    I'm doing my best to remain open minded, but I've not been convinced that she deserves any special treatment or protections.
    That's fair. I may not agree but I don't think you're being unfair.
    I'm also not convinced that the sealed testimony contains nothing incriminating or she feels ashamed. Would she have any regret if none of this had come to light? I have my doubts. Though I'm sure she regrets it now.
    Point for you, absolutely. I shouldn't have attempted to represent her state of mind; I have no way of knowing that. I was projecting how I might feel if I were in her situation and that was unwarranted. (ETA - I will, however, stand by my supposition that she failed to leave her position earlier so as to increase her "high 3", enabling her to draw a larger lifetime pension. Given the number of years she served, it's the only explanation that makes sense for why she didn't throw up her hands and walk out as soon as she realized the magnitude of the problems.)
    Too many times we are told beurocrats are just stuck in a bad system, they were just going along with it and had no choice, etc.
    OK, this is totally off-topic but I can't resist.

    Bureaucrats are almost never stuck in a bad system. They are almost always stuck in a system that merely performs the tasks required of them by law.

    If they're stuck, they're stuck with enforcing bad laws. The F'd-up processes that grind on innocent taxpayers and discriminate against others are the inevitable result of laws so complex that work processes to administer them are impossible to design perfectly, securely, or efficiently.

    If we learned anything from this whole classification debacle, it's that most of the Internal Revenue Code needs to be ashcanned and replaced with something simpler that can be administered in a much more bullet-proof manner. And no one would like to see that happen more than the IRS employees who see this crap up close every day.
    Remorse for something you've done is not the same as remorse for getting caught doing something.
    True. I'm not sure which of those alternatives we're dealing with in this case, though.
     
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    Younggun

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    Glad to cordially disagree, Ben.

    Nice to do so without name calling. Other than a couple of key points, I don't think we are far apart. Or would be if I fully understood certain aspects of a horribly complicated system.
     

    benenglish

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    Excellent post. I wish I had seen it earlier; I would have answered it sooner.
    Ben, I understand from a philosophical stand point what you’re implying, but the reality of the matter is quite different. You’re making up excuses for poor behavior.
    I take your point. I would say that I'm making up excuses for not being a hero but the principle still applies.
    If she felt she was being forced to do something wrong and did it anyway she has no excuses.
    That cuts to the heart of the matter that is technical and makes most people's eyes glaze over. AFAICT, Lerner initiated no wrong actions. The classification system set up was within the perview of her underlings and, by itself, was not wrong. The bad actions that actually hurt people (unlike the stuff that happened directly under her that merely looked stupid) had everything to do with Justice and their meddling, something she could do nothing about except resign (or early retire) in protest. The only thing that would accomplish is take herself out of the line of fire. Instead, she chose to stick around, try to make things better, and make the horrendous mistake of playing political games where she tried to keep things under wraps.

    I've never advocated that she took the right path, only that she didn't do much wrong. It's hard to tell where "protecting your people", a noble sentiment for a boss, crosses the line over to "I'm covering up shit that I shouldn't."
    I’d venture to say she was in a personal gray area. It was her guy doing it and her guys lawyers saying it’s ok, so it must be ok.
    Yeah. And that's a tough spot. Her judgement turned out to be less than flawless and very much in the public eye, which makes it even tougher on her.
    She is afraid that people will see just how corrupt the systems are...
    Almost no IRS employees are afraid of that. They'd welcome it. But...
    She is afraid that people will see ... just how little she did to stop it or quite possibly what all she did to feed it.
    ...is probably on the money.
    I have zero sympathy for that. And neither should anyone else.
    I do have some sympathy. I've been in that situation and stuck it out and tried to change it for years before I walked into the office of my boss 4 levels up and simply said "I won't do this job any more. I think I'm a smart guy and you should find some other place for me in the organization." I'm lucky that he did exactly that.

    Executives don't have the kind of flexibility I had.
     

    Lunyfringe

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    Please be fair. There are plenty of brilliant people who are government employees.

    At least half of them are below average... fair enough? (what can I say, I'm a pessimist)

    My comment about their motivation is because much like huge corporations, working for a gov't entity is soul-sucking due to the daily trudging thru bureaucracy. It feels like there are hundreds (or thousands) of people who consider it their job to make yours more difficult. I don't believe that the complexity of Tax code is what makes security more difficult. The problem is much like gun control- you punish the innocent by making them jump thru all kinds of hoops proving they are who they say they are in order to make it more difficult for criminals... I can implement a system that will prevent any criminal from submitting somebody else's return... problem is, just about every legitimate taxpayer would hate me for making it a horrendous PITA for them to get their own money refunded to them. Granted, because it's the gov't, tax law has to change to accomplish this... so you would have congresscritters legislating something they don't understand to accomplish a goal they really don't care about (other than the secondary goal of getting re-elected- which is some districts is a non-issue)

    Case in point- for me to login to a router on the financial network I work on from my house, I have to use 6 different accounts (not including my ISP and wifi password), all with different passwords, some one time passwords, several different login names, and I have to know obscure system names or IP addresses in order to access them in order.... and automating this with scripts is against policy. The downside is if a customer said there was something down and needed my help, and my laptop was powered down- you're looking at 20-30 minutes before I can START looking at the problem. But in the 20 years I've been working on it, we have never been hacked (it wasn't always this convoluted, but always secured).

    None of this changes that Lerner knew she was participating in questionable morality- the only questions is how did she justify that behavior? (e.g. conservatives, they're racist bastards and deserve it)

    I know, I'm putting words in her mouth... but unless you knew her personally- so are you... I'm just less optimistic about her demeanor.
     
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    sharkey

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    GS-1811? Good for you. But it if you weren't an 1811 (or an 1169 or a 512 or any of a half-dozen more) in the IRS, then you do realize, I hope, that your experience doesn't provide a basis for judging how these things are handled at the IRS.
    Yep good for me. My point was as a former Criminal Inv. I know it doesn’t take a lot of effort to verify things. Certainly it doesn’t take two years. So as a victim of fraud and victimized again by the IRS, my experience doesn’t provide a basis to judge how the IRS handles their business? Please.

    Don’t think I didn’t notice you failed to answer my other questions. Having worked for the city, county, and state, and having worked with various Feds, I notice the bureaucracy and the incompetence increases as you move up the chain.




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    benenglish

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    At least half of them are below average... fair enough?
    Absolutely fair. :)
    ...because it's the gov't, tax law has to change to accomplish this... so you would have congresscritters legislating something they don't understand to accomplish a goal they really don't care about ...
    Isn't "legislating something they don't understand to accomplish a goal they really don't care about" what congresscritters do, all the time, and hasn't it always been so? I guess now I'm being the pessimist.
    But in the 20 years I've been working on it, we have never been hacked (it wasn't always this convoluted, but always secured).
    It's off-topic but you might find a study of computer intrusions into the IRS to be a fascinating subject, one of the few that unambiguously casts the bureau in a positive light.
    None of this changes that Lerner knew she was participating in questionable morality- the only questions is how did she justify that behavior? (e.g. conservatives, they're racist bastards and deserve it)...
    See, that's the thing I don't understand. Why do people assume questionable morality? Late in the game, when the heat started to turn up and she fell back on obfuscating the problems, she was doing wrong. But early in the game, the classification system that lumped (assumed) Tea Party affiliates together was wrong? Really?

    Whenever there's a push in the number of submissions, there's something going on out in the country. The submissions will share characteristics and it's basic human nature to classify things and study them as a group. With absolutely no statutory imperatives about how to proceed with studying these things, the classifiers get to just make up categories out of thin air (or common sense, depending on your viewpoint). No one has ever given me a reasonable explanation why that's wrong.

    It isn't. It's just a way to divvy up the mountains of paperwork and get them processed. IMO, of course.
    I know, I'm putting words in her mouth... but unless you knew her personally- so are you... I'm just less optimistic about her demeanor.
    No, I didn't know her personally but if you run into me at a family reunion, ask me about it.
     

    benenglish

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    Don’t think I didn’t notice you failed to answer my other questions.
    If you see me at a family reunion, ask them again. I'm completely willing to discuss those topics in person but there are things I will not commit to writing in a public forum.
    ...the bureaucracy and the incompetence increases as you move up the chain.
    Thank you so much for posting a statement with which I can unambiguously and wholeheartedly agree. :)
     

    Lunyfringe

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    I appreciate the discussion, especially when it doesn't take ugly name-calling turns...

    I know not everybody in gov't fits the stereotype... my uncle worked for just about every dept of the state of AK from age 17 to 52...(besides a Vietnam tour in the Seabees) He didn't fit that stereotype, but described many that did. I remember a story about his boss droning on about something- he got bored and started reading things on his desk (upside down)... then proceeded to correct his spelling. (One reason why he worked for so many departments)

    He retired when his pension was worth more per year than his salary.
     
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