IRS agent duped into explaining how colleagues start out nice, end up as indifferent robots 'destroying lives'

If the whistleblowers won't come to the journalist, then the journalist…

Poor Alex Mena. Among his revelations to his button-camera-wearing date was that, “It’s almost impossible to lose your job in the government.” No update forthcoming so far, but it seems probable that Mr. Mena will soon be available for work. 

Since leaving Project Veritas, investigative journalist James O’Keefe has had a number of notable successes in getting high-placed government officials and others to open up about what they do. For his latest project, he sent a newly trained recruit to speak with Mena, who works in the IRS Criminal Investigations Unit.

Spoiler alert: Yes, the IRS does snoop through people’s private bank accounts. No, they don’t get a police warrant first. Is it constitutional? Mena doesn’t think so, but it's unlikely anyone will do anything about that because, in his words, the IRS is accountable only to the President and Congress, so it does as it pleases and fears no one.

We are right under the Congress and the President. The States don't have a say in what we do . . .

[T]hese people are not afraid of anything.

‘Don’t they have any empathy at all?'

Mena wasn’t precisely blasé; in fact, at times he sounded a little upset about the man he has become after an unspecified number of years in the service. “We were all nice when we started,” he relates. “We’re like robots right now.

When I [started out in] the criminal investigation unit, the guy is telling me, "The first person you shoot you’re gonna remember, but after that you’re gonna shoot like a hundred people, you’re not gonna remember any of them.”

When his date—a new recruit to James O’Keefe’s staff at OMG—comments that this sounds like military indoctrination, Mena agrees, adding that, “Most of the people in the criminal investigations unit are veterans.”

All the same, their targets aren’t the enemies of the United States of America. They’re not even known tax-evaders. They’re just little people who are easy to go after.

They have no problem going after small people, putting people in prison, destroying people’s lives. They have no problem doing that.

“Don’t they have any empathy at all?” he’s asked.

“No empathy. They’re like robots.”

‘We have all the information from the whole world’

According to Mena, most of the people the IRS target are the victims of “snitching.”

Most of the cases we get is like people snitching on each other.

But just like in many other areas of life, AI is taking over:

We have a system that uses AI … to target potential abusers … We have like, all the information from all the companies in the whole world, actually, not just in the United States. So the AI looks at all the returns, looks at the bank statements … [to] see if there’s like a potential for fraud…

Do they have warrants, to go into those accounts? Mena’s questioner asks.

“Like, no.”

“Is that constitutional?”

“I doubt it!”

No warrant, no evidence—no problem

Constitutional or not, it’s “working really well,” Mena stresses. “Like, in six months, we were able to capture half a billion dollars.” And just recently, the IRS has decided to “go after the owners of the NFL teams, all the teams … because they’re like billionaires and they pay very little taxes … So that’s gonna be fun.”

Fun or not, his date sounds worried.

[Date] But are they using legal loopholes to do that?

[Mena] That’s what we’re gonna find out.

[Date] You would think you would like, have to have evidence. Right?

[Mena] No, not with the IRS. They can audit whoever they want.

A Justice Department operation

During the discussion, Mena describes colleagues who have been working for the IRS for fifteen or twenty years, using the tactics he describes. Only the use of AI is presented as something new, and he makes it clear that the IRS itself isn’t actually in charge of how AI is used; it’s the Department of Justice who sets the rules and configures the algorithms, along with the Inspector General. This is confirmed by White House memos that detail the use of AI, and cautions surrounding that use, in various government agencies.

Commenting on the video, an X user describes his own experience with the IRS:

Another person wonders if the IRS could not be serving its country better elsewhere: