The Times makes a contention that is debatable at best. Misleading at worst.
White House negotiators and the House Republican delegation are closing in on a deal to hike the debt ceiling in exchange for concessions from Democrats on spending. One of those concessions would require Democrats to agree to pare back funding for the Internal Revenue Service passed into law last year as part of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. Here’s how the New York Times summarizes that particular:
The deal would also roll back $10 billion of the $80 billion Congress approved last year for an I.R.S. crackdown on high earners and corporations that evade taxes, though that provision was still under discussion. Democrats have championed the initiative, and nonpartisan scorekeepers have said the funding would reduce the budget deficit by helping the government collect more of the tax revenue it is owed. But Republicans have denounced it, claiming falsely that the money would be used to fund an army of auditors to go after working people. [Emphasis added.]
The flat assertion that Republicans are “claiming falsely” that these funds would be used to audit “working people” is accompanied by a hyperlink directing readers to a Times analysis debunking a related but distinct claim from the charge they’ve outright declared to be false. That analysis focuses on the allegation that the estimated 87,000 employees the IRS aimed to hire with some of these funds would be exclusively dedicated to revenue collection, which they wouldn’t be. Indeed, of the 87,000 IRS employees, only about 10,000 would be dedicated to auditing tax filings and investigating tax crimes.
Additionally, the Times analysis argues that some Republicans have erroneously extrapolated from historic audit rates the precise number of audits Americans making $75,000 or less can expect. What the Times analysis does not even attempt to do is discredit the Congressional Budget Office, which, according to their view of a September 2021 CBO report, confessed that additional IRS funding would increase “the audit rate for everyone.” “Everyone” presumably includes “working people.”
Moreover, as the Times reported last week without any of the enthusiasm it usually reserves for allegations of systemic racial bias, the IRS recently admitted to the charge that the algorithms it uses to flag audit candidates disproportionately singled out African-American filers irrespective of their individual income status. This deservedly mistrusted law-enforcement agency assured lawmakers that it would use these funds to address that disparity, and it might be charitable to take the IRS’s word for it. But that’s a thin basis for the charge that Republicans have knowingly misled their constituents.
Indeed, if the agency is going to meet the revenue targets the CBO has set for it as a result of this new infusion of taxpayer-provided cash, it has little choice but to get aggressive with lower- and middle-income filers. As another Times analysis of a 2021 Joint Committee on Taxation report admits: “About 27.4 percent of taxes owed are by the bottom 90 percent of taxpayers, or roughly households making under $200,000.” That analysis also cited Treasury Department data, which concluded that about 36 percent of the estimated $163 billion in unpaid taxes are owed by the bottom 90 percent of income earners.
Perhaps the charge that the Times set out to debunk was the “army of auditors” allegation rather than the claim that the agency would have little choice but to broaden its dragnet to capture more “working people.” If so, the fact check could have been better worded. As it stands, the paper’s contention is debatable at best. Misleading at worst.