CNBC reports that the IRS alone has shed more than 31,000 employees as of January, according to the agency's own inspector general — and that the agency's chief, Frank Bisignano, may have given Congress an incomplete account of that fact. I was not present for the testimony, and I will not render a verdict on the man's intentions. But I will say this: when the keeper of the public accounts cannot give a straight answer to the people's representatives about the number of his own clerks, something has gone badly wrong in the management of affairs.

In my day I kept a printing house. I knew to the last sheet of paper what my stock was, what my wages bill ran, and what I owed the merchant who supplied my ink. A proprietor who cannot answer those questions to his own satisfaction will shortly be unable to answer them to his creditors. The same principle scales upward without limit — to a counting house, to a customs office, to the revenue service of a republic.

The defenders of these cuts will say: the agency was bloated, the savings are real, the taxpayer is better served by a leaner instrument. Perhaps. But a leaner instrument that cannot collect what is lawfully owed is no instrument at all — it is a hole in the public pocket. The revenue that goes uncollected because auditors have been dismissed does not vanish; it is simply transferred, without legislation or debate, from the Treasury to those wealthy enough to have complicated returns and patient enough to wait out an understaffed examiner. The small wage-earner whose tax is withheld before she ever sees her pay suffers no such advantage. She has already paid.

I spent years as a postmaster arguing that a well-run public infrastructure pays for itself many times over in the commerce and civic order it enables. The post road that seems a cost is in fact a revenue engine; the sorting office that seems a bureaucracy is in fact the circulatory system of trade. I suspect the same arithmetic applies here, though I mark this as inference, not recollection of modern data: a well-staffed revenue service likely collects more than it costs, and the savings from dismissing its staff may be illusory — paid for quietly by the gap between taxes owed and taxes received.

As for the charge of misleading Congress: that is a matter for the representatives to press with vigor and for the public to watch with attention. A free government depends on honest accounting between its officers and the legislature. When that accounting grows evasive, the citizen who pays the bill has every right to demand clarity — and to keep demanding it until she gets a plain answer in plain numbers.

Counsel for the working person: If you believe your own tax affairs are in order, keep them that way regardless of what the agency's staffing looks like. An understaffed collector is not a forgiving one; the audits that do proceed may be pursued all the more aggressively to compensate for the ones that don't. Keep your receipts. The best protection against a confused revenue service is a clean ledger of your own.