The 87,000 new IRS employees will sweep the nation in an effort to be ‘more helpful’ and ‘more responsive.’ And Americans will be grateful. Uh-huh.
The 87,000 new IRS employees will sweep the nation in an effort to be ‘more helpful’ and ‘more responsive.’ And Americans will be grateful. Uh-huh.
L iberals have come up with increasingly ridiculous ways to sell the hiring of tens of thousands of IRS employees. Their latest whopper was unveiled when Representative Katie Porter of California said it was “a load of malarkey” to say that the bill’s 87,000 new IRS employees will mean more audits for Americans earning less than $75,000 a year. “The No. 1 agency that the American people would like to [see] have more agents, be more helpful, pick up the phone, build better technology, be more responsive — is the IRS,” she said, incredibly, on MSNBC Friday. “So this is an investment in allowing the IRS to modernize.”
Porter then pulled out a whiteboard on air and argued, “For every dollar that we invest in IRS enforcement, of the most wealthy Americans . . . we can recover $5 in taxes that are owed to the rest of us.”
That’s not how whistleblower William Henck, a former IRS lawyer who was forced to leave the agency after a 30-year career, sees it. He told Fox Business that “the idea that they’re going to open things up and go after these big billionaires and large corporations is quite frankly bulls***.”
“The big corporations and the billionaires are probably sitting back laughing right now,” he continued.
Henck added that he thought it was “insane” to double his old agency’s budget. He predicted that the IRS will target businesses that don’t have enough money to hire Washington lobbyists. He said that new hires at the IRS will inevitably be assigned simpler cases involving uncomplicated returns. That would mean an added focus on small-business audits.
“You better count on getting audited, because that’s what they’re going to be doing,” he warned. “They’re going to be going after your car dealerships, roofing companies.”
The IRS’s current annual budget is about $14 billion. They have about 80,000 employees. The legislation will eventually increase the number of full-time-equivalent employees to more than 165,000. That means that the IRS will have more employees than the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and Border Patrol combined.
A congressional analysis projects that most of the additional audits will be done on those making under $200,000 annually. The Senate rejected an amendment from Senator Mike Crapo (R., Idaho) that would explicitly limit audits and enhanced enforcement to taxpayers and companies making more than $400,000 annually. Every Democratic senator voted against the Crapo amendment, while all Republican senators supported it.
It seems reasonable to expect that the audits will tilt toward the self-employed and those who run small businesses. The rich will remain, as they are now, insulated by top-dollar lawyers and accountants.
What makes the whole exercise of raising taxes in the Biden bill all the more bizarre is that senators had been briefed that nearly every assessment has concluded that enhanced and increased enforcement wouldn’t really result in that much additional revenue.
So Democrats are picking a fight where they don’t have to if their true goal is raising revenue. They must realize that the IRS is deeply unpopular with voters all along the ideological spectrum, Representative Porter’s happy talk on MSNBC notwithstanding.
If Democrats receive a shellacking in House races this fall, it won’t be because they weren’t warned. It will be because their arrogance and belief in the power of big government seduced them into once again believing that Americans are just waiting to be helped by a kind bureaucrat.
The truth is more akin to Ronald Reagan’s famous observation that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this report misattributed projections about new audits to the Tax Foundation.