Opinion | Gutting the I.R.S. Is the Opposite of Fiscal Responsibility

If you were to ask the top chief executives in the world to name the best strategy to attack waste in their organizations and balance the books, there is one answer you would be very, very unlikely to hear: Take an ax to accounts receivable, the part of an organization responsible for collecting revenue.Yet the private sector leaders advising President Trump on ways to increase government efficiency are deploying this exact approach by targeting the Internal Revenue Service, which collects virtually all the receipts of the U.S.government — our nation’s accounts receivable division.

Last week, the Trump administration started laying off about 6,700 I.R.S.employees, many if not most of whom are directly involved in collecting unpaid taxes.Every year, the government receives much less in taxes than it is owed.

Closing that gap, which stands at roughly $700 billion annually, would almost certainly require maintaining the I.R.S.’s collection capacity.Depleting it is tantamount to a chief executive saying something like: “We sold a lot of goods and services this year, but let’s limit our ability to collect what we’re owed.”Perhaps only the company’s competitors would approve of such an approach.

Yet here we are.Aggressive cuts to our nation’s accounts receivable function will reduce the amount of tax revenue coming in, which will in turn increase our nation’s deficit and add to our $36 trillion in debt.So why go down this path? Let’s be clear: Shrinking the I.R.S.

will not lower your tax obligation.That’s up to Congress.Aggressive reductions in the I.R.S.’s resources will only render our government less effective and less efficient in collecting the taxes Congress has imposed.

It will shift the burden of funding the government from people who shirk their taxes to the honest people who pay them, and it will impede efforts by the I.R.S.to modernize customer service and simplify the tax filing process for everyone.We are having trouble retriev...