On September 27, I wrote about the federal government's inventory of its own AI, the only public list of what artificial intelligence it runs on you, and closed with some homework: "Search it for the department handling your benefits, your taxes, your immigration status, or your employer's regulator, and read the use case names."
If you did that for your taxes, you found 61 rows for the Internal Revenue Service. Three carry the label "high-impact," the federal tag for AI whose output serves as a principal basis for decisions or actions with a legal, material, binding or significant effect on people's rights or safety. Two of those three haven't been deployed, and the third is retired. None of them is in use.
I owe you an admission about that homework: it could only ever turn up what the IRS reported. On September 24, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA, the IRS's watchdog) issued a report on five AI use cases used for workload selection — tools that help decide which returns and cases the IRS works. All five were deployed, and the IRS itself presumed them high-impact. Two of the five, TIGTA found, "did not have an impact assessment documented."
The September piece's caveat holds here too: "Nothing here proves anybody broke a rule." The IRS may well be allowed to keep systems like these off the public list (more on that below). But the list built to tell you what AI the government runs on you shows no high-impact AI in use at the IRS — while the IRS's own watchdog reviewed five.
Sixty-one rows and a watchdog's report
What's on the list? Treasury's own copy of the list carries the same 61 IRS rows as the consolidated federal file. Each of the three high-impact rows, among them a retired "Resume Scanner," carries a justification that says the opposite, a data-entry muddle that proves nothing either way. One deployed row, marked "Not High-impact," is a compliance model that predicts which small tax-exempt organizations filing Form 990-N, the e-Postcard, aren't eligible to file it. No row describes choosing income tax returns for audit. Could one of TIGTA's five be listed anyway, as "Not High-impact"? Nothing public says: the report doesn't name them, and the IRS's rows were first due in December 2025, before its manual added the audit presumption; no label changed for April's compliance deadline.
Now the watchdog. TIGTA says the IRS's own inventory held 225 AI use cases as of December 2025. It identified seven deployed high-impact uses drawing on data from the IRS's data warehouse and reviewed the five used for workload selection. What did it find?
Missing assessments. Two of the five had no documented impact assessment, and the three that did "were conducted prior to the effective date of OMB Memorandum M-25-21 and based on prior guidance."
Thin data paperwork. Four "did not have any testing documentation" for checks on their data, though IRS staff said "data quality checks were completed, and the data were fit for use."
No instructions, by one account. The IRS's analytics office told TIGTA that as of July 2026 it had received no guidance or instructions from Treasury on the minimum risk practices. Treasury's 2025 compliance plan, for its part, says high-impact uses "are documented with risk management and mitigation plans."
To be clear, TIGTA checked paperwork, not performance; it "did not evaluate the accuracy of the data itself." The IRS agreed with both recommendations, says it has put standard data-quality processes in place, and says it will complete impact assessments for "currently deployed high-impact AI use cases as of November 2026." As of October 24, 2026, the inspectors general's shared site lists both recommendations as open.
Why does a missing assessment matter? M-25-21, the White House budget office's memo on federal AI, says that when a high-impact use isn't compliant with its minimum practices, the agency "must safely discontinue use of the AI functionality." Those practices include an impact assessment "before deploying any high-impact AI use case," and agencies had a year, until April 3, 2026, to document them. Does that mean the five should be switched off? TIGTA didn't say so, and I won't either.
More importantly, the IRS has a rule of its own. Its AI manual, in a section dated February 10, 2026, presumes high-impact any "AI that informs or influences whether a taxpayer will be subject to audit, or what aspects of a return will be subject to audit." That presumption is the IRS's own addition — the White House memo's list has no entry for tax audits.
Why presume it? Because how a selection system is aimed has consequences. A 2025 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, by eight researchers including Daniel E. Ho and Jacob Goldin, found that although audit selection was race-blind, Black taxpayers were audited at 2.9 to 4.7 times the rate of non-Black taxpayers, and it traced the disparity among earned-income-credit claimants largely to a policy decision to prioritize catching overclaimed refundable credits over other kinds of noncompliance. None of that research concerns the five systems TIGTA reviewed, but it shows why audit-selection tools earn the label.
Isn't the IRS allowed to keep this off the list?
Mostly, yes — and the IRS's side deserves a fair hearing.
The list was never meant to be complete. The executive order that created it in December 2020 asked agencies to inventory uses that are "non-classified and non-sensitive." The law that wrote it into statute in 2022 makes the inventory public "to the extent practicable" and subject to protecting "sensitive law enforcement" information. And the tax code shields the "standards used or to be used for the selection of returns for examination," and the data behind them, if the Treasury secretary determines disclosure "will seriously impair" enforcement. (Publish the audit formula and you've published a guide to staying under it.)
The IRS uses that room. GAO, Congress's auditor, found that 65 of the IRS's 126 active AI uses in June 2025 were either "too sensitive for public reporting" or exempt research, and that the IRS "may mark use cases sensitive that contain details about mechanisms related to law enforcement or tax enforcement." Of the uses GAO counted as publishable, fewer than half (25) made Treasury's January 2026 inventory, and IRS officials said some were withheld "at the request of use case owners or by Treasury." (Three counts, three scopes: 225, 126 and 61 measure different things at different dates, so don't subtract one from another.)
TIGTA reviewed the inventory, too, and "assessed non-reportable cases for accuracy"; it made no recommendation about either.
Then there's the person in the loop. In most cases, GAO found, the software "provides a risk score or recommendation for audit or investigation," and then "an IRS official reviews the output and decides whether to pursue the audit or investigation." (Two fraud-detection uses do act without human review; one pauses a refund on a possible identity-theft return, after which an employee reviews it.)
And the IRS argues that better software is good for honest filers. Its chief executive, Frank Bisignano, told the Senate Finance Committee in April that the agency uses AI and advanced analytics "to identify high-risk areas of non-compliance and fraud with greater accuracy," and that better modeling "will help us reduce the resources spent on false positives in audits." Fewer false positives means fewer honest people audited — a real benefit.
So the formula can stay secret. Can the fact that a system exists stay off the list, too? Here the rules pull in two directions. OMB's notes on the inventory let an agency leave out a use whose sharing would be inconsistent with the law, but where only particular details can't be shared, agencies "must only exclude those details, while including any fields that can be shared or released." The IRS manual tells teams to "mark the overall use case" withheld when a sensitive name or detail is needed to understand it. Whether these five were withheld under either instruction, or listed under another label, isn't public, and I'm not suggesting anyone broke either. But one leaves a row with blanks in it; the other leaves nothing to count.
Nor does a person in the loop settle the label: M-25-21 says a high-impact determination is possible "whether there is or is not human oversight for the decision or action." And the IRS isn't alone: on September 24, the Small Business Administration's inspector general found that SBA "has not implemented a process to identify high-impact uses."
France names the software and keeps the formula
What does it look like when a tax office keeps its formulas secret but tells you the software exists?
France's tax administration, the DGFiP, uses AI to target audits, and says so. Its Foncier innovant program reads public aerial images anyone can view for the outlines of buildings and swimming pools; an agent checks every anomaly before the owner is contacted or taxed. Its data mining produces lists of files that the Cour des comptes, France's public auditor, calls a decision-support tool, not a national audit schedule: only after human analysis might an audit follow. Same design as the IRS.
In April, the finance ministry published a yearly count of how many audits the software steered. In 2025, AI selection was behind 52 percent of the business files closed by regional and local tax offices (49 percent in 2024) and 54.6 percent of the individual files closed (up 9.7 points), and data mining put more than €2.8 billion in tax and penalties into collection. (That means assessed, not cash in hand.)
The law asks for more. French law has said since 2016 that a decision made with an algorithm must say so, with the rules and main characteristics given to the person on request, and larger administrations must publish online the rules of the main algorithms behind individual decisions. The DGFiP did that for tax calculation, publishing its income-tax, property-tax and housing-tax algorithms; since 2019, taxpayers have been told on their notices that an algorithm computes their tax.
But both duties yield to protected secrets, including the investigation and prevention of offenses. The government's own guide to the law names the DGFiP's fraud-targeting algorithm, CFVR, as a case where the targeting algorithm itself is exempt. France's Constitutional Council drew one line in 2018 — a secret algorithm cannot decide alone — but because people sort the audit lists, that limit doesn't reach them.
Before you crown France, the fair counterpoint. The numbers are the government's own, and they wobble: the minister's editorial in the same press kit puts the shares at more than 57 and more than 63 percent, figures that differ from the chart's. The Cour des comptes says the technology's effectiveness remains to be shown: data-mined audits were 44 percent of all audits in 2023 yet produced 13.8 percent of the tax and penalties put into collection, though 65 percent of the income-tax files the algorithm flagged did lead to an adjustment. And the famous pool hunt found 20,000 undeclared pools in a 2022 test, by the tax administration's count, but given that year's gains, the auditor called the DGFiP's original €130 million target unrealistic.
Others push from outside. In its advisory opinion on a 2020 experiment in collecting public online posts, the CNIL, France's privacy regulator, noted guarantees, among them no automatic audits. A 2024 parliamentary report by deputy Charlotte Leduc asked the DGFiP to periodically prove the tools carry no bias, since past audits are used to target future ones. And France's 2027 budget bill, pending as of October 24, 2026, would make the scraping permanent, with no facial recognition but no right to object.
France keeps its targeting formula secret, as the IRS does. But it tells taxpayers the software exists, names it, and publishes how much auditing it steers and what that auditing assessed — while its auditor and legislators argue over whether the numbers hold up. The secret and the scorecard coexist.
What November could bring
What follows is my extrapolation from the documents, not a forecast.
November comes, and the IRS finishes impact assessments for its currently deployed high-impact AI, as promised. If those uses stay withheld, or listed under another label, the inventory never shows it; the only public receipt may be a recommendation marked closed on an oversight website. The next inventory could look exactly like this one.
Or take the reclassification route. At the April deadline, FedScoop reported, the Energy Department's two deployed high-impact uses "went from high-impact to not high-impact, thereby exempting them from risk management requirements." Imagine an audit-selection model reclassified because a person makes the final call, though the memo says human oversight doesn't rule the label out. Would you ever see the paperwork?
Then Congress. H.R. 9501, the AI Tax Integrity Act of 2026, from Reps. Vern Buchanan and Steven Horsford, would have Treasury pilot AI to identify inaccurate returns and have GAO report on "the accuracy of the artificial intelligence tools" in that pilot. As of October 24, 2026, it sits on the House Union Calendar with no floor vote. If it passes, the first public accuracy figure for IRS AI could come from a pilot, while the list still shows no high-impact AI in use.
Meanwhile, the IRS's AI governance team told GAO it lost "over three-quarters of its staff" in 2025. More models, governed by fewer people, visible nowhere you can look: that future wouldn't require anyone to break a rule.
Both parties want more of it. Who's asking how it's checked?
Who's right? Start with this: almost everyone wants more of it.
Buchanan, a Florida Republican, says "we should be empowering the IRS to use modern, emerging technologies," and his bill is co-led by Horsford, a Nevada Democrat. Former Commissioner Danny Werfel told CNN that "AI gives us a forensic edge to select the right returns for audit," but that it must be balanced with "a human review – double checking and confirming AI is generating reliable output."
The caution comes from both flanks. Pete Sepp, president of the center-right National Taxpayers Union, told a Ways and Means subcommittee in February 2025 that "we must offer some caution over how AI could work to the detriment of taxpayers," citing an expert's view that an IRS automated tax assistant "has fallen short with certain responses." (His group still urged a yes vote on H.R. 9501 in September.) Ten senators led by Ron Wyden (nine Democrats and Maine independent Angus King) asked the IRS in January what protections ensure that "AI-driven enforcement decisions are auditable, explainable, and free from bias, including racial bias." And Barry Johnson, the IRS's former chief data and analytics officer, told CNN that AI "will make the IRS more efficient in finding noncompliance," but added: "I don't think AI is going to substitute for the staff who have been lost."
Not one of them asks the IRS to publish its formulas. The argument is over whether you can know the systems exist and are being governed — exactly what the public inventory was built to tell you.
What does this mean for you?
Look up the IRS's rows yourself. Treasury's AI page links its inventory: 61 IRS rows, three marked high-impact, none in use. Read it knowing what the rules let it leave out.
Keep the odds in proportion. CNN reports that "less than 1% of filers have been audited by the IRS in recent tax years."
A real audit starts with a letter. The IRS says, "We won't initiate an audit by telephone." Treat a phone "audit" as a scam.
Ask why, not how. You have a right to know "why the IRS is asking for information, how the IRS will use it" and what happens if you don't provide it. You won't get the formula (the law shields it), and the IRS's audit page credits "computer screening" without ever mentioning AI.
Object, then appeal. The Taxpayer Bill of Rights gives you the right to "raise objections and provide additional documentation" and to "a fair and impartial administrative appeal of most IRS decisions." For high-impact AI, M-25-21 adds "a timely human review and a chance to appeal any negative impacts, when appropriate."
Get free help. The Taxpayer Advocate Service is "an independent organization within the IRS," its service is free, and it answers at 877-777-4778 (eligibility rules apply).
Watch November, when the IRS says its assessments will be done, and whether TIGTA's two recommendations close.
If you want a say, ask your representative whether H.R. 9501, or any bill expanding AI at the IRS, should also require saying such systems exist. It's a bipartisan bill, so make it a bipartisan question.
The lesson, as I see it
The September piece put its faith in counting: the durable protection, it said, is "that the file is public, machine-readable, and counted by strangers." The IRS is a humbling test of that line. Strangers can count only what's on the list, and an agency can lawfully decide that what matters most stays off it.
So treat the inventory as a floor. The tax code shields selection standards and the data behind them, and the sentence that does so says nothing about listing that a system exists. OMB's own notes already point to the middle path: exclude the sensitive details, keep the row.
My vote? Give every deployed high-impact system a row, even a mostly blank one: a generic description, whether it's presumed high-impact, whether its impact assessment is done and, once a year, the share of audits it touched and what they assessed. France publishes a version of that last part while keeping its formula secret. The IRS could too, without revealing a single selection criterion. Until then, watch November, watch the next inventory, and keep counting what you're allowed to count.
Share this with whoever does your household's taxes (if that's you, consider it shared), so when the next IRS envelope lands, they know which questions are theirs to ask.