Skip to main content

Robert Kovacev Quoted on IRS Use of AI in Albuquerque Journal

Subtitle
"Hamill: Tax Administration is Not the Right Venue for Testing AI Technology"

Albuquerque Journal

The Albuquerque Journal quoted Robert Kovacev on the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) use of artificial intelligence (AI) to determine penalty relief or failure to file and failure to pay taxes, and specifically on an IRS AI tool called Reasonable Cause Assistant (RCA). The decisions of this tool are supposed to be reviewed by humans, however Kovacev notes that an older study by the U.S. Treasury Department Inspector General showed that the RCA tool incorrectly identified penalty relief justifications 89 percent of the time. More shocking, exactly zero of these incorrect judgments were reviewed by a human. One would have to expect that the AI tools have significant deficiencies in administering the tax laws if their decisions are not human-reviewed.