The I.R.S. lost roughly a quarter of its employees since President Trump took office, hampering the agency’s ability to conduct audits.
Page F1From§Eachthe late evening edition — 31 August 2026
IRS Audit Revenue Plummets Under Trump While Detroit Public Schools Pay Kids $1,000 to Attend Class
As it ran on the front
Let's run the two filings against each other, hon, and see where the columns land.
Filing one: audit revenue collected by the Internal Revenue Service has fallen under the current administration, according to the watchdog that tracks it. The report doesn't estimate a motive. It counts dollars, and the dollars are down.…
…(cont) Filing two, same season, different ledger: Detroit Public Schools are paying students up to one thousand dollars each just to show up for class. That's a documented incentive, on a school district's own books, denominated in the same currency as filing one.
Neither of these numbers is a rumor. One is a federal watchdog's audit finding. The other is a school district's own stated payment program. Put them side by side and the gap isn't in the arithmetic — the arithmetic works fine on both sides. The gap is in the column each dollar sits in.
One column is enforcement: money the government collects to make sure large returns get checked the way the law says they should. That column is thinning. The other column is inducement: money a school district hands a teenager to walk through a door that used to be free to walk through on its own. That column is growing, one thousand dollars at a time.
I want to be precise about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying the audit money and the attendance money come from the same account — they don't, one's federal, one's a district budget. What I'm saying is simpler than that. When the filing that's supposed to bring money in gets thinner, and the filing that's paying kids to stay in a building gets thicker, both of those are choices about where the money goes. Somebody signs both of those. Nobody signed a note explaining why one direction went up and the other went down.
The audit line and the attendance line don't reconcile to a shortage of money, hon. They reconcile to a preference about whose column it sits in.
“They'll tell you there's no money to chase down rich people's tax returns, then turn around and hand a fourteen-year-old a thousand bucks just to show up to school - that's not austerity, that's a budget with a very specific blind spot. Follow the column that's shrinking and the column that's growing and you'll find exactly whose bill never comes due.”
“Attendance incentives are an innovative, data-driven approach to student engagement, and audit staffing levels are a separate operational matter entirely unrelated to enforcement priorities - enforcement priorities we are absolutely still, look, we're still auditing people, just - fewer of them, apparently, per the numbers.”
The receipts
Detroit public schools have an absolutely hideous rate of chronic absenteeism. Their solution? Pay kids to show up.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.