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Waste at the IRS

Posted by richrobinson 9 years, 6 months ago to The Gulch: General
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This may seem small but yesterday we received a letter at work from the IRS telling us they had changed our mailing address. It listed our old address and said it would be changed to the new one. The next letter we opened was also from the IRS and it had our new address on it. The letter was sent to confirm that they would now start using that address. Two nearly identical letters sent in two different envelopes. Why not just list the old and new address in one letter. I hate inefficiency. What sucks is the only change is our street is now called a Road and not an Avenue.

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  • Posted by $ sekeres 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Sorry. I wasn't clear. The waste was not in the bid & response process per se. The systemic waste (minor, in this example, but symptomatic) occured for several reasons. Among those are that everything (from building additions costing millions of dollars to 50c packages of Q-Tip equivalents and the proverbial paper clips) had to go through the same bidding process when, below some $ cutoff, it would have been more efficient to simply purchase from petty cash. And that the entrenched bureaucracy (over the protests of our lab staff) kept purchasing from "low" bidders whose paperwork met specifications ("Form xxx is filled out in every particular"), but whose products did not -- like train cars filled with mouldy soybeans in LA, instead of with wheat in MN. My point is that the bid process is a tool that is only as efficient as its users.

    By the way, I second your experience of the frustration of the baseline budgeting process and its disincentives to plan and save. Glad to have moved on.
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  • Posted by $ sekeres 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Even bidding out goods and services doesn't always work -- if shoddy, inefficient "providers" claim to be qualified. In one particularly frustrating instance in a public hospital laboratory where I worked, the staff ended up writing bid specifications for heavy-duty cotton swabs that included a functional irrelevancy (package color?) to differentiate between 2 suppliers with vastly different quality control standards. We couldn't get the Accounting Department bureaucrats to understand and/or care that after subtracting the unusable percentage of the "low" bidder's products (not to mention paying college-educated employees to sort and discard swabs that were broken, missing tips, etc.), the "higher" bid was actually less expensive!
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  • Posted by $ nickursis 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I'm willing to bet there are a few in the closets there, as well. The shape shifting reptiliods are the nasty buggers, usually are Democraps. I think there is a vid on YT where Pelosis eyes become slitted pupils..or is that Obamanations? Have to go find it again...
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  • Posted by $ nickursis 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Indeed, I guess the Greeks got a better deal, as their politicos lied to them up front. Ours do it from behind and get the media to endorse it. Bah...
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  • Posted by richrobinson 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    We are going the way of Greece. Politicians just keep finding jobs for there unemployable family and friends. Wonder if these guys ever complain to each other about how hard their day was?
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  • Posted by richrobinson 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I actually thought they could have e-mailed it but that's about ten steps ahead of where they are now. I hear a lot of talk about eliminating the tax code. I hope it gets done this time.
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  • Posted by $ nickursis 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Genetic engineering at it's best. What do you think the aliens at Area 51 are under contract to provide?
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  • Posted by $ nickursis 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    A "TPU"! What a crock! Now we are "units"? I will vote for whatever candidate promises in blood, to eliminate these idiots. Or sell the whole unit to China, they would fit right in there....
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  • Posted by $ nickursis 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Plus, that bit of software is being designed, evaluated and tested by the Automation department, and is planned for distribution with the 5th update of Windows 21, in 2028. Just wait, it'll come.....
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  • Posted by $ nickursis 9 years, 6 months ago
    A classic case of how government worms along. One dude is the change address dude, and one dude is the confirm address dude. 2 dudes doing a job one could do. Efficiency par excellence! But they will just tell you how good a custodian of our money they are, their toilets seats only cost 350.00 unlike the military's!
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  • Posted by plusaf 9 years, 6 months ago
    And there was no way they could send you an email with a link to a site where you could click a button to "agree" or "disagree."

    Stone-age thinking... the best thinking we're allowed to by... by them.
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  • Posted by Mitch 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Very true, it seems as though everyone is on the dole besides us Gulchers….
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  • Posted by richrobinson 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Excellent points Mitch. Putting that work out for bids would save potentially billions of dollars. If we still had a Republican Party they would push for that. Unfortunately they all just play the game now.
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  • Posted by Mitch 9 years, 6 months ago
    Not to pee in the punch bowl but if this was all the waste the government did, I’d say its 100% efficient. The problem with the government departments is a lack of competition for one’s job or usefulness. They have no reason in the world to be efficient as being efficient means more work for them.

    They have to spend money from there budget every year to get the same money the next year, if they don’t spend the money, they get docked during the next fiscal year. What happens is the internal departments all work together to find ways to spend your cash. Money gets pushed around from department to department until it’s all gone and no one can think of anything else they could possible buy. All of this is to ensure that they get the same amount or more next year so they can do it all over again, with your cash.

    I worked for the Bureau of Land Management as a contractor in Information Technology initially then as a government employee. Many times I protested that we shouldn’t spend money on useless equipment just to deplete the budget. As you know, the computer industry moves quick, many times they purchased equipment and let it just sits until it’s worthless.

    A simple solution is to put the services that these departments provide out to bid and make the government bid on providing its own services. Of course, lowest bidder wins. This will never happen but I wish…
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  • Posted by $ sekeres 9 years, 6 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Once we got a "money owed" letter. Turned out they had transposed 2 digits in one of the children's SS#s. 2 months later, 2 otherwise identical "amended return" letters arrived correcting their error -- one addressed to each "Tax Payer Unit" parent.
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  • Posted by JCLanier 9 years, 6 months ago
    Rich: look at it this way, it could have been a letter stating money was owed or that you were going to be audited... Now that's a ball buster.
    In either of these cases you probably would have received only one notice! Go figure.
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