TO GET A sense of how bad things got in the recent past at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), America’s primary tax-collecting agency, consider a photo posted on Twitter by a Treasury advisor in 2022. It depicts the cafeteria at the organisation’s offices in Austin. Nobody is eating. Rather the entire floor is engulfed in paper files. During the pandemic, with offices closed, returns filed by post—which still have to be manually transcribed into computers—piled up. By summer 2022 there were 21m unprocessed paper tax returns. The wait to speak to an IRS staff member on the phone rose to nearly 30 minutes—for the 20% able to get through. Erin Collins, the National Taxpayer Advocate, a watchdog, wrote at the time that “paper is the IRS’s kryptonite, and the agency is still buried in it.”