Working at the IRS; Pew on Taxes

Bloomberg News has a long story looking at life inside the IRS: Devin Leonard & Richard Rubin, IRS Workers Are Miserable and Overwhelmed, April 8, 2015. The headline conveys the gist of it, but read the article to learn more about budget cuts, hiring freezes, reorganizations, and other constraints that make the lives of these public servants challenging. 

Think of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NASA, or the Department of Defense: that agency can't do its work unless the folks at the IRS do their work. 

I listed those three agencies because they get very high approval ratings (65-70% favorable) while the IRS got more unfavorable (48%) than favorable (45%) responses. That's from the Bloomberg News article, crediting Pew Research Center. For more on that survey of attitudes toward agencies, see Most View the CDC Favorably: VA's Image Slips, Pew Research Center, Jan. 22, 2015. The complete report is here.

Speaking of reports from Pew, see 

• High-Income Americans Pay Most Income Taxes, But Enough to Be "Fair"? (March 24, 2015)
• 5 Facts on How Americans View Taxes (April 10, 2015)
• The Biggest U.S. Tax Breaks (April 13, 2015)
• Among Developed Nations, Americans' Tax Bills Are Below Average (March 30, 2015)
• Federal Tax System Seen in Need of Overhaul (March 19, 2015)