I feel like you didn’t read the article. This is what basically happened:
IRS got funding
a bit later, IRS says "hey! We got 500 million back so far"
here comes you: “it’s a trick!”
They didn’t use stats or any framing here. They just reported progress.
If you are being genuine at all, you are grossly misunderstanding the situation and additionally your arguments don’t make sense in the grand scheme of things: at some point of debt collection, you will collect less than 1%. From there you keep getting more.