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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.
To me this sounds like the same old issue that the GOP has been complaining about for years namely that it's been de-facto IRS policy for years now to preferentially target rural/low-income individuals because they are viewed as being "easier marks". Wealthier people/businesses have the money to hire lawyers and accountants to fight you which is not what you want if you're an IRS agent trying to make a quota.
As for the accusation of racism is, impression is similar to yours, the democrats in general and the media in particular have been so thoroughly mind-killed by identity politics/intersectionality that they are simply incapable of not projecting racism, sexism, homophobia, etc... onto everything they see.
This is, at the very least, a very misleading summary. The IRS is an order of magnitude more likely to audit people making $10m+ than those making under $1m.
what's the old saw? there are lies, damn lies, and statistics? People making $10m+ are a tiny fraction of those being audited. As such I don't think you've actually rebutted my claim
To have a bit of fun with this: so are you damned lying or manipulating statistics when you trivially point out that a miniscule portion of the population has fewer audits than the vast supermajority of the population?
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...people. There is nearly no system imaginable that wouldn't result in them being a tiny fraction of those being audited, unless we're willing to let large quantities of even the most obvious errors/frauds go without audit in every other income range.
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