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Notes -
New Frontiers in Algorithmic Racism - Tax Edition
The New York Times has an article out on the IRS algorithmically targeting black Americans at higher rates than other racial groups. The claim is that there's something in the algorithm that inappropriately biases it against black Americans. Summarized in the opening paragraphs:
OK, so what exactly is causing them to get audited more if it's not individual bias, the machines are blinded to the race of the individual, and the rules are the same for everyone? Apparently some of it comes down to targeting EITC filings:
Unless I'm missing something, the article does not explicitly state what the relevant factors are that result in this targeting are. In what I see as typical NYT style, it does leave a breadcrumb that might be suggestive if you're ignoring the narrative quotes embedded in the article:
To me, this reads like the most likely explanation for black taxpayers being audited more frequently is that they report their income incorrectly in easy-to-detect ways. Since the IRS already has W-2 data for filers, it's probably not very hard for them to notice when someone reports their income wrong. There isn't really any elaboration that I find after this, so I'm unclear on how much this accounts for auditing disparities. The implication of the article and the quotes from "equity" advocates imply to me that we should figure out a way to make sure that white Americans are audited at least as much as black Americans, regardless of who is misreporting their income more frequently.
As cynical as it sounds, I'm beginning to hear the term "algorithmic bias" as nothing more than a form of projection - algorithm systems frequently detect something real about the world, people with racially motivated politics don't like that outcome, and they seek to shift the algorithm towards a bias in favor of their preferred group. If a program that is optimized for detecting incorrect tax filings works as intended to detect them, but turns up more black Americans than white Americans, the suggestion appears to be to change the weighting until it evens out the races, regardless of the impact on the efficiency of detecting lost revenue. The "algorithmic bias", from my reading of this would be injecting a deliberate racial preference to counter the program noticing actual disparities. I am reminded of the racial resentment scale, in which people who say that "blacks have gotten less than they deserve" are not racially resentful, while those who think things like "Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up, Blacks should do the same without any special favors" are racially resentful.
Anyway, I'll be curious to see if the study is released more publicly and details what exactly is causing the disparity.
Expecting any sort of consistency is a fool's errand. The left vacillating on being pro-DHS/FBI during trump abut anti-DHS/FBI during Bush. Or pro-IRS during Obama. Both sides do it, so it's not just to pick on the left. The leopard does not care whose face it is that gets eaten. I think these organizations have too much power, and that bias is secondary to this.
A solution could be transparency, but if people knew how the the algorithms worked, like what triggers an audit, they would be gamed and rendered infective.
My priors are that most cases of ‘tax fraud’ are poor, low-IQ people trying to slide one over with techniques they learned by word of mouth from other poor, low-IQ people, and not from carefully designing strategies based on available algorithmic data. I know this because I hear poor, low IQ(or at least uneducated; these are not quite the same thing, but lack of education probably severely hampers the ability to understand accounting algorithms even for those with high IQ in ways that it doesn’t necessarily effect other things) people quite openly discussing this every year in February and march. I doubt that will be strongly effected by algorithms for targeting potentially fishy returns except in the form of third hand rumours that will get them to be temporarily more honest.
See also: Sovereign citizens going to court and claiming it has no jurisdiction for some bizzare and inane reason.
Well yeah, but poor and not very well educated people doing things that would technically be tax fraud if they got caught is way more widespread than that, and also pays off often enough for most success stories to be true.
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