#understaffed

At the moment, this is a scenario most NHS nurses worry about whilst going to work every day.

For each extra patient a nurse has outside the safe ratio of care, mortality for those patients raises 7%.

Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary’s, solution is that nurses should work harder. We’re already doing the work of 4 nurses, 2 assistants, the cleaner and cook. We are already exhausted.

Patients do not deserve to be treated by exhausted nurses.

[This is copied from a NYT article, which is behind a paywall, as are the links.]

Most of us know the I.R.S. from the unpleasant task of filing taxes. The agency processes more than 260 million tax returns and related documents each year, with an annual budget of nearly $14 billion and about 80,000 full-time staff members.

It does much of this work on antiquated systems. A recent Washington Post column depicted a bureaucracy that has not adapted to the computer age and instead has stacks of papers extending into a cafeteria. The agency still uses technology dating back more than a half-century, including devices running a programming language, COBOL, that few coders still know. It typically communicates with taxpayers through snail mail or fax.

Congress has cut the I.R.S.’s budget 20 percent since 2010. That makes it hard for the agency to help Americans file their taxes; it answered fewer than one in 10 calls for help during the 2021 filing season.

The funding shortage also makes it difficult for the agency to collect what the government is owed. The tax gap — the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid — is about 15 percent of all taxes.

The new funding will help address the shortcomings by letting the agency update its systems and hire more people. In total, the I.R.S. plans to recruit 87,000 employees. Many of those new hires will fill jobs left behind by retirees in the coming years, but its work force will expand overall to let it take on more duties in auditing, processing and customer service.

Republicans have cited the planned hires to amplify conspiracy theories about armed I.R.S. agents coming after law-abiding Americans. It’s true that some agents who conduct criminal investigations can be armed, like other law enforcement officials. But only 1 percent of new hires will be in such jobs, which focus on more serious financial crimes, according to the Treasury.

Republicans have also raised concerns that the I.R.S. will use the extra funds to go after conservative groups. The agency did target some right-wing organizations seeking tax-exempt status in the 2010s, but it also used similar tactics against progressive groups.

With the additional resources, the I.R.S. does plan to crack down on people and businesses who don’t pay the taxes they owe.

The question is who the agency will focus on. The Biden administration has said it will target rich tax cheats and ordered the agency not to increase audits on people who make less than $400,000 a year or on small businesses. The administration argues that underfunding led the I.R.S. to reduce audits on wealthy taxpayers in particular, so the new money should aim to close that gap.