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Penny Arcade - Comic - Irsa Major
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Irsa Major
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Posts
Well, Republican making anyway
I'm impressed the investigation only took five months 😛
Exactly. Had a similar issue with a tax thing that - while my fault - amounted to "I don't owe any of you people money can you just look at what I wrote?" that went on the better part of a year. The fun thing was that their schedule for sending threatening letters was still based on old staffing levels pre-pandemic (and pre-Trump). So I'd get all the threats, even though I was still waiting on a first callback to get a case going with the tax court.
And then the next year, I had to deal with Minnesota's RS. Luckily, they had their shit together and resolved it pretty quickly. Though it may have been expedited by being able to just point to the IRS case #.
And I'd wager the people whose job it is to give back extra money are not the same people whose job it is to get unpaid money. So for the people working your case, it is a priority to get you your money back because it's one more thing off their desk. It's just that they have so very much on their desk, and there are so few desks. There might be more people assigned to the "get unpaid money" team, but mostly there's more people assigned to the "lots of money" teams than the "not lots of money" teams. Likely the wheels are turning almost as slowly on collecting past due amounts from those who owe "normal people" amounts of money.
No, this is something entirely different.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted
I mean look at the comic. They have one overworked dragon covering 5 phones.
Zoom calls are... challenging.
Especially when they are on different ones.
It also has no profit motive to do anything else. Don't gloss over that.
As painful as getting it solved was, the people I've dealt with in the IRS haven't been your typical stereotype of a government bureaucrat. They've tended to be smart, knowledgeable, polite, and actually interested in helping solve the issue. There's just not enough of them.
That's my experience with most government workers. Even my miserable experience with Medicaid, I really can't pin on any of the people I talked to. The rules they have to abide by are a hodgepodge of well-meaning regulations, half measures, and leftovers from past tugs of war between politicians. But most government workers I've interacted with genuinely wanted to help. And the ones that didn't, it's important to remember they're not the ones making the rules; they're essentially customer service reps and I'm just another Karen complaining about my coupons.
No one on the other side of a customer service call has a profit motivation beyond getting paid.
Indeed. I am reminded of my retail days when asshole customers would threaten to never come back. Great, I'd love to never talk to you again and you alone aren't going to move the needle on whether the store stays open so I get paid.
There's no profit motive for them to hire enough people to provide service.
That's actually doubly wrong, since IRS hiring doesn't come directly out of taxes, it's a government budget item, and having more IRS agents does directly increase their "profit" since it enables them to enforce people paying taxes better. But certain people have a vested interest in keeping the IRS weak and inefficient.
It's also worth noting that when Biden started hiring more IRS agents there was a strong movement on the right to present that as him building his own private army to take over the country. It's almost as if that and the above might be linked.
Not the service I was referring to in my reply, but thanks for putting words in my mouth. It's super honest and you should be proud! ♥
I mean, if you were talking about something else it's very much not clear in your reply. But I guess you can get snippy and act wronged if you like.
Anecdote time: I work in the logistics portion of the energy sector. I'm paid to help people get service. But there are always customers that do not realize that screaming at me or spending 20 minutes arguing in an attempt at guilt tripping me does not change my ability to get them service if service is simply not available in their area. And the resources to get them service were unavailable well before they ever picked up the phone and called me or anyone else in my department. And it's not like I enjoy having to give people an answer they don't want to hear, because then they start pulling the shit I noted earlier like it will somehow change reality. But people are human and humans suck.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
*If* they already have your money, maybe. But if they need to provide service to get that money, then getting bent out of shape at them is stupid and pointless when they have to give news that even they don't want to give.
Edit: Hell, I am staring at at email request for delivery from a customer right now, where they didn't keep to their agreed to contract terms and I have learned the hard way I have to document that on their delivery requests or they *will* try calling in and try to bullshit some poor CS rep with no time to do research into giving them an afterhours delivery - which costs the company overtime pay for the driver and is inherently less effective use of time compared to scheduled deliveries. Which multiplied by hundreds (or more) of customers trying that on a regular basis every week means resources to service people that kept to their contracts in good faith get drained.
Does the customer care? Fuck No! Because like most humans, they only see and care about their own little slice of reality.
Oh, this particular bit of goosery has a known architect - unlovable old goose Grover Norquist, whose political power is built on part on making taxes as unpleasant as possible.
You're describing people who've paid for a product.
There are more motives in life than the profit motive. I don't subscribe to the American idea that government is worse than private business, but there are many reasons why a government employee can act badly.
Some are big issues like bigotry and corruption. Some are much smaller, like poor KPIs, institutional inefficiency, shitty bosses, and alienating work.
Most of the reasons why someone in a government call center might act badly are the same reasons why someone in a private company might act badly. The profit motive - or lack thereof - is irrelevant, since neither private nor public employees receive a share of the institution's income.
I'm describing the sort of person that fails to pay for their deliveries for over 9 months, has a credit hold for a past due balance well over several thousand dollars, and is shocked when they can no longer get same day service as stipulated in their service contract (one of the required terms is keeping their account current) - and I can see their payment history so I know exactly what I am talking about.
Sure, I've got direct experience in the field, and others. I just don't like it when people trot out "profit motive" on a clearly selective basis because it is fundamentally dishonest.
You're talking about a specific person. One, incidentally, paying for a product whether or not they're successful in doing so.
I am talking about people broadly. Which is who private companies deal with. Who are what their own broader corporate strategies are structured around. Which always boil down to maximize profit at every expense, customer satisfaction be damned.
And if you cannot be honest about that then there is no reason to regard anything else said as having any integrity either.
And this a frequent thing in my job we have to keep an eye out for, because people pulling that shit makes it *worse* for the people that actually handled their agreed to responsibilities (like paying for the service) by hoovering up non-infinite resources. Which, given this is in the energy sector, can lead to property damage, injury, or loss of life.
This isn't some flippant ass shit like forgetting to pay your cell phone bill for a bit and fixing it is just flipping a few data points in some software.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/30/1227851166/tax-return-irs-danny-werfel
And in a massive bureaucracy it sucks even more because it takes forever to even help a person.
And if they need to do something out of sequence it requires so many steps and sign offs.
The biggest thing in there is probably the 12 state trial of the thing where you can file your taxes for free directly with the IRS, like a modern country.