Do you? Don't you in fact want the auditors to find the most fraud per hour worked? For the last fifty years, the prevailing ideology in the US has been a stra

Do you? Don't you in fact want the auditors to find the most fraud per hour worked? For the last fifty years, the prevailing ideology in the US has been a straightforward system of bureaucracy is horrible compared to some chaotic, production optimizing startup. But if you compare now and fifty years ago, today's "running the government like a business" has produce a sea of corrupt inefficiency. For that reason, I think it's perfectly not to fixate on dubious metrics like "most fraud (found) per hour worked". Regulators should be neither low paid nor super high paid. They should be honest, even idealistic, people working to keep society honest rather than "entrepreneurs" looking for some kind of "score". The problem the US has now is that for example IRS audits go after the poor because the rich have too annoying lawyers. This is the absolute worst. Of course, this is a product of the bizarrely complex tax code and the legality of a whole variety of shady maneuvers. I'm not optimistic about this going away but if it goes away, it would require the state simplifying the tax code and outlawing the whole fabric of hidden financial maneuvers. Until something like that happens, you're not going to win the arms race. And in this situation, "incentivizing" the agents just means they'll figure out a way to go after a certain middle type - rich enough to have some money but too poor to defend it. Like I said, we've wound ourselves into a government of competitive proxy reaching pseudo-economies, we "Goodharted ourselves to death"[1]. But naturally people want to add one more spring to this clockwork nightmare. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law