“Put this all together and it means the IRS needs tens of thousands of people who are (a) smart, (b) willing to do really tedious work, (c) for moderate wages, (d) while working for a soul-crushing bureaucracy, and (e) being loathed by all right-thinking people. Does this sound to you like a recipe for disaster? Me too.”
Wow…to a certain extent this sounds a bit like working in child care, or elder care, or Microsoft tech support. (To name a few jobs I’ve done that were exacting and received little respect or pay.) But the IRS is probably worse.
Living ~400lbs 
The whole concept of a daycare only works if the people paying for their kids to attend the daycare earn more than the daycare staff. Otherwise the daycare couldn’t pay its employees. But even so, I am still bothered that people paid to teach, entertain, and keep safe the most important people in my life earn so much less than I do. That seems fundamentally wrong.
I love working as a software developer, but that was the one major downside of the career. I figure if I took four or more years off to be a stay-at-home Dad, when I tried to get back to work nobody would hire me. My wife has a similar problem in her field. So we use daycare, and pray our children are not worse for the experience.
For the IRS, part of the problem can be reduced – simplify the tax code. Taxes that are simpler would be easier both for regular citizens and also IRS employees. But getting Congress to make something that’s already complex into something more simple is probably a lot harder than navigating the current tax code.