The government targets those most unable to protect themselves.
Data from the IRS shows that the agency mainly targeted low-income people — but few millionaires and billionaires.
This is terrible.
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On Wednesday, Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released data provided to it by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on audits performed by the agency in fiscal year 2022. Despite the infusion of new funding earmarked for the IRS via last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, the agency continued historic trends of hassling primarily low-income taxpayers, with relatively few millionaires and billionaires getting caught up in the audit sweep.
“The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times virtually everyone else—were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit,” reported TRAC, noting that the poorest taxpayers are “easy marks in an era when IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn’t have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions.”
In fact, “if one ignores the fiction of auditing a millionaire through simply sending a letter through the mail, the odds that millionaires received a regular audit by a revenue agent (1.1%) was actually less than the audit rate of the targeted lowest income wage-earners whose audit rate was 1.27 percent!”
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022, directed $80 billion worth of new funding over the next decade to the IRS so it could hire 87,000 new workers, purportedly to better target millionaire and billionaire scofflaws. The Biden administration and credulous journalists claimed that this would in no way increase audits for those making under $400,000 annually—suspect assurances not provided within the text of the actual bill. This increased capacity meant only those at the top would be targeted, supporters insisted. But this ignores how the IRS’s incentives work and how agencywide reform might be too heavy of a lift.
Kevin McCarthy vowed to take on the Biden Administration’s hiring of additional IRS agents.
The first bill considered by the new House of Representatives will address a Biden administration initiative to hire additional IRS agents over a 10-year period, Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Saturday morning.
“I know the night is late, but when we come back our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents,” he said amid applause from the Republican caucus. “You see, we believe government should be to help you, not go after you.”
Some background: The Republican National Committee and several Republican lawmakers have criticized new IRS funding, claiming that it will provide the agency with an “army of 87,000 new IRS agents.”
Will the GOP keep its promises and stand up to this?
