To the editor:

Once again blatant untruths are being spread on The Sentinel’s opinion page. The latest are in Mr. Spahr’s letter of Friday, Aug. 19, in which he states that 86,000 new IRS agents are coming for your hard-earned wages.

Sadly, these outright lies come not only from social media and cable news, but from lawmakers like Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz, who are telling their followers that the new IRS employees are being “armed up” (Gaetz) and will be targeting folks who make “$75,000 or less” (McCarthy), and that “those IRS agents will come after you, not billionaires and big corporations!” (Cruz).

I would like to refute each of these claims:

1. In the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Biden, nearly $80 billion has been assigned to the IRS. Since 2010, the agency’s enforcement staff has declined by 30 percent. The IRS budget has been cut by nearly 20% since 2010, impacting the agency’s ability to staff up and modernize half-century-old technology. Some of the agency’s computers still run on COBOL, a programming language that dates back to the 1960s.

In a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the agency is planning on hiring auditors who can enforce the tax laws against high-income corporations, not the middle class, along with employees to provide customer service to taxpayers. The majority of hires will fill the positions of about 50,000 IRS employees on the verge of retirement, which will net about 20 to 30-thousand workers, not 87,000.

2. Treasury officials rejected the claim that agent hires would be carrying weapons — saying the faction of armed agents are an “extremely critical but small” piece of the IRS, representing less than 3% of its total workforce. Also, arming certain IRS agents is not new; the criminal investigation unit of the IRS has been around since 1919. The armed agents do not interact with average Americans; they focus only on specialized issues like narcotics, money laundering and Bank Secrecy Act violations, Treasury officials said. Recently, such agents have been involved in the task force that is tracking assets of Russian oligarchs.

3. Through these actions, aimed at recovering tax income from high-income earners who are not currently paying taxes, an estimated $204 billion will be raised, hence the “Inflation Reduction” designation.

Joan D. Loewen

Lewistown