Elon Musk’s team for making the American government more efficient, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is organizing a hackathon to build a “mega API”. This would offer easy access to data from the American tax authority IRS. The plan has met with resistance from IRS employees who indicate that the proposed deadline is not technically feasible and that there is a risk that it could ‘paralyze’ the IRS systems.
According to Wired, DOGE wants to create an application programming interface (API) that allows the movement of IRS data from different systems to one cloud platform. This platform would function as a new ‘reading center’ for all IRS data.
Hackathon with IRS engineers
As part of this plan, DOGE invites dozens of IRS engineers to an event in Washington D.C. where they will work together to build the API. Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company co-founded by Peter Thiel, a long-time ally of Musk, is reportedly involved in this initiative.
DOGE wants to have the API built in just 30 days. However, an IRS employee who spoke to Wired indicated that this deadline is “technically not possible” and would likely “paralyze” the IRS systems.
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Key figures in the project
According to Wired, two leading DOGE employees are involved in organizing the hackathon. They are Sam Corcos, a health technology executive, and Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old software engineer who previously worked at Databricks and now serves as a special advisor to the Office of Personnel Management. Corcos would like the IRS to suspend all its ongoing engineering work and cease attempts to modernize existing computer systems.
In early March, The Washington Post reported that Corcos had personally intervened by ordering the IRS to lift restrictions it had placed on Klinger’s access to systems. Shortly after, he proposed an agreement to share IRS data between multiple government agencies.
Sensitive data
The plan would ultimately include all data within the IRS, including American taxpayers’ names, addresses and social security numbers. Employer and tax return data would also be made available within the API. Currently, access to these systems is strictly limited, and IRS employees are only granted access on a need-to-know basis.
Whether DOGE’s proposed API plan is feasible remains to be seen. One source claims that schematizing the IRS data would probably “take years”. Moreover, the source added that “these people have no experience, not only in government, but also with the IRS or with taxes”.
Despite the lack of experience and the necessary controversy, DOGE has not let itself be stopped to date. Since Trump’s inauguration in January, DOGE employees have slowly made their way into the computer systems of various federal agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Social Security Administration and, most recently, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The focus on a more efficient government is huge. Existing people, processes and applications have no certainty about the future. It is the goal and the result that count. DOGE isn’t afraid of cutting down known and trusted processes if they think they can be more efficient. In this case, a hackathon will be used to see how quickly the IRS data can be made more accessible.
European tax authorities’ IT systems are not any better
It is not unique that the IT systems of the American tax authorities are challenging. In Europe many countries have their own problems with their IT systems. For example, in the Netherlands, the tax authorities still work with an IT system from the 1970s. It took about five years to implement a VAT increase on essential products from 6 to 9 percent. The idea of DOGE to build a new application on top of the legacy system that acts as an API and reduces the core system’s load, isn’t a bad idea. Whether it’s possible to do this in a couple of weeks is a different discussion, but time will tell.