• The IRS has gradually rolled out a program to allow Americans to directly file taxes with the IRS.
• It's designed to make filing taxes simpler and easier.
• A group of Republicans want Trump to end it, saying it's government overreach.

More than two dozen House Republicans are asking President-elect Donald Trump to terminate the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) free direct tax filing system as soon as day one of his presidency.

Republican Reps. Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina sent a letter to the president-elect on Tuesday urging him to end the program via executive order, saying that the program poses a "threat to taxpayers' freedom from government overreach."

The letter was signed by 27 other Republicans and is also addressed to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leads of DOGE.

The program came about as the result of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $15 million in funding to study the creation of a website allowing Americans to directly file their taxes to the IRS for free. That led to the rollout of a pilot program that was available in 12 states last year, and is set to expand to 24 states in 2025.

A spokesperson for the IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Many Americans rely on tax-prep companies like TurboTax and H&R Block to do their taxes each year. The new program is designed to compete with those programs and make filing easier and less costly for Americans.

Smith and Edwards argued in their letter that the program represents a conflict of interest for the IRS — that the agency should not be in charge of both assessing taxes and enforcing tax crimes. The duo wrote that the agency "has little incentive to ensure hardworking Americans do not pay more than they owe in taxes."

They also cast the free direct-file program as an example of the "weaponization of government against Americans," a long-standing focus of Trump and MAGA-aligned right.

It is unclear whether Trump will take the lawmakers up on their request, and the Trump-Vance transition did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Republicans have broadly sought to roll back the $80 billion in additional funding for the IRS that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, saying it will be used to enable the agency to target conservatives and ordinary taxpayers.

Attention, players. You are about to compete in a new challenge—but first, do you know how to speak Korean? In preparation for Season Two of “Squid Game,” one of Netflix’s most popular Korean thriller series, the streaming giant announced on Tuesday that it has teamed up with the language learning app Duolingo to help viewers […]

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U.K.-based 1E, which detects software problems on desktop PCs remotely, has been acquired by Germany-based remote-working company TeamViewer for $720 million. This is TeamViewer’s biggest acquisition so far and will allow it to expand its North American market. 1E, which was sold to Carlyle Group in 2021, has several large U.S. customers, including HP and […]

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• I joined the Nextdoor social network service in 2021.
• It allows you to ask for help finding a missing pet or restaurant recommendations.
• I got a giant cabinet removed by a carpenter and my ice maker fixed by an appliance repairer for free.

Let's just say that my husband and I didn't share the same taste as the previous owners of our house.

We particularly objected to a giant-size TV and entertainment center made of dark cherry wood in our family room. We called it "the brown bus" because it looked like a British double-decker had backed into the wall.

The problem was that we couldn't afford to have it removed for a couple of years because of the cost of buying our home.

Then, in 2022, we decided we couldn't stand it any longer. We live in an expensive area and got quotes from contractors that were upward of $400.

"It'll take at least two days to dismantle because it's not screwed in but glued fast to the wall," one said.

We could have hired someone with a sledgehammer

But he added that the wood could be recycled. He said he suspected the custom-made furniture may have cost as much as $3,000.

"You could get someone to use a sledgehammer, or you might find a carpenter who wants the wood," he suggested.

I'd joined Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social networking site, a year earlier. I remembered seeing people asking for recommendations for service providers ranging from babysitters to electricians.

You have to join your neighborhood once in the platform so I was a member of the one that covered our town and nearby areas.

I decided to experiment by "advertising" the cabinet on the group and uploading a photograph. "Someone might want it," I told my husband. He was skeptical, thinking I was wasting my time.

Still, I wrote that it was up for grabs to anyone who could remove it for free. "Just don't leave a mess," I said.

I received a few inquiries, but as soon as I explained that the cabinet was attached to the wall with some immoveable form of superglue, they lost interest. I was about to give up hope when a local carpenter took me up on my offer.

It took him three days to painstakingly slice it from the wall and take it apart. Then, he carted the wood to his workshop, looking happy.

Since then, I've become slightly addicted to Nextdoor. I enjoy people posting unusual requests. One woman wanted to get rid of wooden shutters from her 100-year-old house. She offered them for free, and an artist who makes custom, decorative birdhouses took the lot.

I got my ice maker fixed for free

Another member asked people to send greeting cards to an older neighbor who rarely received any mail. Then, there was the person who extended a lunch invitation to strangers who were on their own for Thanksgiving.

But the act of kindness that surprised me most happened this fall. The ice maker on our refrigerator hadn't worked for more than a year. When it first broke, a clueless guy from the store where we'd bought it had charged us a $250 callout fee, only to say it was a lost cause.

Last month, I decided to give it another try. About a dozen Nextdoor members suggested names of appliance repair people, and I picked one at random.

I called him, and he asked for the error code. He said we didn't need to buy new parts and talked us through the repair on the phone. We eventually got the thing to work.

I asked if I could Venmo some money, but he refused payment. "Happy Holidays," he said. I couldn't believe he'd done the job for free. But that's the spirit of Nextdoor.

• A Pew Research Center analysis shows the largest occupations for young US workers without degrees.
• Men often work as drivers or in construction, while women work in customer service or nursing roles.
• College enrollment rates have declined in recent years.

Customer service representatives and truck drivers are the most common jobs for young women and men without a four-year degree, respectively.

Men and women between the ages of 25 and 34 who don't have college degrees also work as construction laborers, health aides, cashiers, and chefs, per a Pew Research Center analysis published in July.

There was little overlap in the most common jobs for young men and women without a college degree, but the two groups did share two roles: first-line supervisors of sales workers and retail salespersons.

Roles like these have become particularly prevalent for men, whose college enrollment rates have fallen behind women's in recent years.

Forty-seven percent of US women between the ages of 25 and 34 have a bachelor's degree compared to 37% of men, per a Pew analysis published in November. However, overall college enrollment rates have fallen in recent years: The share of male high school graduates between the ages of 16 and 24 enrolling in college has declined to 58% as of 2023 from 67% in 2018, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Young women's enrollment rate has declined to 65% from 71% over this period.

Many of these young people are seeking jobs that don't require a college degree, and some have benefited from companies dropping degree requirements. The share of US job postings that require at least a college degree has fallen to 17.8% from 20.4% in 2019, according to an Indeed report published earlier this year. To be sure, many employers still prioritize hiring workers with a college diploma.

The Pew report published in July also highlighted the most common job categories for Americans with a four-year college degree. Four occupation categories were among the 10 most common jobs for both men and women: software developers, managers, accountants and auditors, and elementary and middle school teachers.

Are you looking for a job and comfortable sharing your story with a reporter? Please fill out this form.

Companies often struggle with how to respond to cybersecurity incidents. According to one recent poll, only three out of five organizations have an incident response plan in place, and only around a third do regular drills to ensure that their plans remain effective. The consequences of poor incident response are costly. The International Monetary Fund […]

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I've been fighting with my health insurance company a lot lately. The mundane billing disputes are exactly the type of situation that, theoretically, AI should make easier. That, however, is not what's going on. The first point of contact is the AI-powered online virtual assistant, which asks what it can help me with but has, thus far, never been able to actually help. After some back and forth, it directs me to an allegedly real person who's supposed to be better equipped to handle the matter. A lot of the time, I get referred to a phone number to call instead. Once I call that number, I'm presented with a new robot — this time, one that talks. It's not any better at understanding my problem than the typing robot, but it's also not so sure I'm ready to get to an agent just yet. Yes, it understands I'd like to speak with a representative, but why don't I explain what about first? As my frustration grows, I can hear my voice rise to a Karen-level pitch I swore I'd never use.

By corporate America's (sometimes dubious) telling, AI is basically the answer to everything, including customer service. Businesses say it's the way to unlock efficiencies and improve customer "journeys" so people can solve their problems and get what they need on their own, and fast. The bigger, though less advertised, focus is how AI can save companies money and cut costs, whether by helping human assistants or, in likelier scenarios, reducing the need for human assistants at all. Corporations have long seen contact centers as cost centers, and ones they're constantly looking for ways to reduce.

"It's a lot of work, and it's expensive to think about customer experience and design your AI in a way that's going to be an enjoyable experience," said Michelle Schroeder, the senior vice president of marketing at PolyAI, which creates AI-based voice assistants. "And most companies that are thinking about cost cutting and the AI revolution are not really thinking about the customer."

Simply put, the AI still doesn't work that well. Many of these chatbots and virtual support agents are not ready for prime time. People don't want to use them, but they have to anyway.

"Companies are operating in the dark, in some sense. They have this idea that this technology is going to provide them with cost savings," said Michelle Kinch, an assistant professor of business administration at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "They don't exactly know how to deploy it."

At the moment, customers are the guinea pigs in companies' experimentation with AI. We're the ones navigating the mishaps, overcoming the hurdles, and serving as case studies for what works and what doesn't. The hope is that all this testing will pan out, and the AI will get better as time goes on. But that's not the only outcome possible. We may just be consumers, standing in front of a chatbot, begging to talk to a real person forever.

Consumers are already suspicious of the whole chatbot thing. A recent Gartner survey found that nearly two-thirds of customers prefer that companies don't use AI for customer service. The main reason for their concern was that it would make it harder for them to reach a person. They also worried it would take jobs and give the wrong answers. A J.D. Power survey found bank customers aren't sold on AI. Some academic research indicates that when consumers hear "AI," it lowers emotional trust, and that consumers evaluate service as worse when it's provided by a bot versus a human, even when the service is identical. People think automation is meant to benefit the company — as in, save money — and not them.

Many of them use AI in their daily lives, to some extent, like using ChatGPT to research a product or ask a question about a warranty, said Keith McIntosh, a researcher at Gartner. They're just wary in a customer-service setting that it won't do the trick. "They know the tools can work, but they're just worried that service organizations will use it to just block access to a person and probably do not trust yet that the technology will actually give them a solution," he said.

Companies need to reassure customers that they're actually using AI to deliver a solution they can use in a self-service way and offer a clear path to an agent when necessary, he said. That sounds nice, but that's often not the reality. It's tough, if not impossible, to get a real person on the phone in a way that can be deeply frustrating and anxiety-inducing.

"When we do have that acute need to talk to a person, the chatbot becomes a hurdle," Kinch said.

Even setting aside the cost savings for companies, there are clear reasons that AI should be a good fit for customer service. When people reach out to a company, it's often with the same basic questions — when is my package arriving, where are my tickets, what is the balance on my checking account? Generative AI chatbots are good at distilling this sort of simple information and packaging it in an easy-to-read, conversational way — assuming they're not making stuff up.

"Most companies have tiered operations where they have tier-one, tier-two, tier-three support in increasing complexity, and that tier-one support is typically the sort of high-volume, low-complexity type questions," said Jason Maynard, the chief technology officer of North America and Asia Pacific Zendesk, a customer-service platform. "We're already seeing some customers that are really successful at automating a lot of what has been typically like their tier-one operations."

He pointed to DraftKings, which has millions of players, many of whom have basic questions about where to find their bonuses or how to work a promotion that would be expensive and inefficient for a human to answer on a case-by-case basis. It would be an "untenable cost" for the size of their brand, he said.

What gets more complicated is when people get up the ladder into tier-two and tier-three issues. When "Where is my package?" becomes, "You say my package is here and keep sending me a picture the FedEx guy snapped of the delivery, which shows ⅓ of my package is clearly missing," the robot's in a pickle. (A former coworker is in such a situation now.)

"Customer experience is so much more complicated than people realize," said Chris Filly, who heads marketing at Callvu, a customer-experience company. "The customer-service team has to deal with an infinite number of potential issues that come up across all these different touchpoints, all these different customer types. It's very, very complicated to make sure that every node in that network has perfect information from everything else."

No system, AI-driven or otherwise, is going to be perfect. But weighing on the corporate decision of what counts as "good enough" is money. Maynard, from Zendesk, spends a lot of time with chief operating officers and chief customer officers in his position, and they're under pressure to cut costs. They "know they're under the microscope," he said — some CFO reads a story about how a company cut 700 jobs using AI support agents, and they shoot over an email asking, "Why aren't we doing that?"

"We're in a macroeconomic environment where there's just much more scrutiny on costs these days for any organization," Maynard said, adding that thanks to increases in interest rates, there's a "real focus on profitability, and that puts pressure on margins."

This creates some misaligned incentives. Companies are inclined to implement AI broadly even if it's not appropriate and will make their customers miserable. They may see the immediate dollar signs they save by moving to an automated system — but they don't see the consumer on the line shouting at the AI agent and pleading to talk to a human.

"They tend to view contact centers as a cost center, not as a profit center, and the only thing you want to do in a cost center is reduce cost," said Jeff Gallino, the CEO of CallMiner, a software company that focuses on conversation intelligence and customer experience. "They're not looking for transformative, they're looking for incremental."

I recently found myself watching a panel at a conference hosted by Fortune magazine that was focused on unlocking the economic potential of AI, featuring executives at companies such as Santander and Siemens. The consensus was that AI was inevitable — bank tellers are out, robots are in, and everyone is just going to have to get used to it, including begrudging consumers who are often on the unfortunate end of it. Rodney Zemmel, a senior partner at McKinsey, said consumer acceptance is coming. "It's amazing how many people in the US were dead against any form of facial recognition until it saves them two minutes in the Delta security line in the airport," he said, or were "massive privacy advocates and for a free pizza online will give away all their personal information." As long as the benefits are there, people will come around to it.

That sounds lovely, except for a lot of consumers, the benefits aren't that evident yet, or at least not enough to outweigh the drawbacks. AI looks like just another measure companies put in place to boost their bottom lines. The bull case is that the AI gets better over time, that five years from now, the virtual agents will be lifelike enough that nobody can tell the difference, and we'll just be chatting away with robots all day to solve our problems. At the moment, companies are building the AI-enabled plane, in a sense, while flying it. Eventually, the plane will be built: The models will be trained, they'll have the right data, and there will be best practices in place for deployment.

Maynard compared the current moment to building a website in 1999 — everyone's guessing at what this is supposed to look like, but eventually, they'll figure it out. "That transition, we're just very, very early in it, and like all technology changes, it's sort of like things that you think are going to happen really fast tend just to proliferate out into the broader economy and have people adopt them and all these things, it just takes longer than anyone expects," he said.

"People are not enjoying that experience right now," Gallino said. "I very strongly believe that they will enjoy the experience probably soon."

Filly, from Callvu, said that a survey his company conducted on attitudes toward AI in customer-service settings shows consumers are coming around on it and are more willing to give it a chance. Still, they prefer to deal with a live agent in most situations.

"The honest truth is that the data is getting better, that there is hope that this will all resolve itself," he said. "We know that there are certain aspects of customer service that AI is doing well. Now, how long before the state-of-the-art AI makes it into that chatbot that's annoying the heck out of you? It might not be there yet."

The bear case is that significantly better doesn't come. There are no guarantees that this will all just work itself out. The conventional wisdom in business is that if customers have a bad experience, they'll vote with their pocketbooks and go elsewhere. But many industries are uncompetitive, and you can't easily pick up and walk away from your health insurer or your cable company. What's more, if every company has a mediocre AI experience, the bar might just be lowered across the board.

Many companies don't prioritize customer service and contact centers. They're a necessity, but the goal is to make them as cheap as possible.

"Everybody says, 'Oh, this is just going to get better naturally, and then thus conversational AI will get better naturally.' There's two huge flaws with that," Schroeder, from PolyAI, said. For one thing, Google Home and Alexa have been around for years, and they're not wizards. "Even that is, still years later, not getting the difference between 15 and 50," she said. That's a "dealbreaker" for a good conversation. "The second thing is that most of these companies are thinking about conversational AI purely as an efficiency play and as a cost savings and human replacement," she said. If the point of the AI isn't to do a good job, then why would it?

Companies' new favorite way to make — or, rather, save — money, is making consumers slightly more miserable. Hopefully, that will change, eventually. We've just got to wait and see.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• A South Korean man was given a one-year suspended sentence for evading military service.
• He was found guilty of intentionally putting on weight to get out of a combat role.
• This is just the latest example of South Korean men going to extreme lengths to try to avoid serving.

A South Korean man was found guilty of evading military service by deliberately putting on weight.

A court in Seoul sentenced the 26-year-old man, whose name was not publicly disclosed, to a year in prison, suspended for two years, according to The Korea Herald.

He was convicted of violating the country's Military Service Act, which requires all able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 35 to serve at least 18 months.

While most South Korean men are expected to serve for at least a year and a half, shortly after finishing high school, the conscription law has a number of exceptions.

Certain K-Pop stars with governmental medals can defer their service under the so-called "BTS Law," named after the popular band.

Additionally, exemptions may be granted to individuals who are deemed incapable of serving because of illness, or mental or physical inabilities, which can include those who are obese.

The Korea Herald reported that the defendant gained substantial weight by doubling his daily food intake and drinking large amounts of water immediately before his physical.

According to the newspaper, the man received a Grade 2 assessment at his initial physical examination in October 2017, which is the second-highest grade and would have qualified him to serve in combat.

But he received a Grade 4 assessment on his examination in June 2023, which disqualified him from a combat role, instead allowing him to serve in a non-combat position.

The Korea Herald said he weighed more than 16 stone in that examination. At about five feet and five inches tall, this made his BMI 35.8, making him clinically obese.

The incident is not an isolated one.

In a 2017 Military Service Statistics report published by the Military Manpower Administration, a South Korean government agency that facilitates conscription, 37% of the 59 draft-dodging cases detected that year involved the deliberate gaining or loss of weight.

This was the most common method in attempting to evade military service, with the second most common being faking a mental illness, with others falsely registering as disabled, and one internationally breaking a bone.

Last year, prosecutors sought a one-year prison sentence for a professional volleyball player on a charge of colluding with a military broker in an attempt to evade conscription by faking an epilepsy diagnosis.

That same year, South Korean prosecutors said they had indicted 137 people on charges of evading conscription or aiding such offenses, accusing them of working with local military brokers to fake disabilities.

In 2008, 10 young South Koreans were sentenced to six months in prison for paying a military broker to learn how to raise their blood pressure to flunk the physical assessment for conscription.

This involved not sleeping for several days before the exam, drinking lots of coffee, and chain smoking.

Meanwhile, earlier this year a former South Korean professional gamer was sentenced to a year in prison for pretending to have an IQ of 53, after prosecutors accused him of flunking a psychological test in order to be diagnosed with a mental disorder.

In this latest incident, a friend — who was sentenced to six months in prison for aiding and abetting — provided the man with specific plans on how to put on weight, according to The Korea Herald.

The friend denied the charges, saying he didn't think the defendant would go through with it.

Streaming service and media software maker Plex on Friday introduced a redesign of its software that puts more emphasis on discovery, easily accessing your watchlist, and other personalization features — including those for home media enthusiasts who still use the app to organize their media libraries. Over the years, the company has tried to balance […]

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As companies’ server infrastructure grows, they often run into challenges keeping tabs on the health of their various assets, like cloud instances and local data centers. Monitoring tools, also known as observability tools, can help — but lots of tools quickly becomes overwhelming. According to one survey, seven in 10 organizations believe that monitoring is […]

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