"During Fiscal Year (FY) 2022, the IRS collected more than $4.9 trillion in gross taxes, processed more than 262.8 million tax returns and other forms, and issued more than $641.7 billion in tax refunds."
So 5.7B is about .1% of the IRS's transactions that year.
That's also less than it could possibly cost to deploy and maintain Worldcoin.
The IRS is better at preventing fraudulent transactions than most credit card processors and fraud prevention providers. I know they have a more restricted system so it's probably easier than credit card fraud, but it's still at least an order of magnitude.
That figure covers a lot of tax fraud identity verification doesn't solve. The actual figures are around $25bn a year of stopped fraudulent refunds, at a cost of a few thousand employees [1].
> Tax and Government Fraud Cases Spiked 68% in 2022
> The IRS flagged $5.7 billion in tax fraud in 2022, and there were nearly 8 million reports of suspicious tax-season activities.