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IRS is not coming for your hard-earned pay
To the editor:
The arguments in Michael Spahr's letter to the editor of Jan. 28 are based on the false premise that 87,000 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 refuted these claims in an Aug. 2022 letter to the editor, and I restate and update them here.
1. In the Inflation Reduction Act, signed on Aug. 16, 2022 by President Biden, nearly $80B was assigned to the IRS, to be phased in over 10 years. Since 2010, the agency's enforcement staff has declined by 30 percent, The IRS's budget has been cut by nearly 20 percent 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 IRS hires would fill positions of people leaving the agency over the next decade, the Treasury Department said. That includes staff members across departments, 50,000 IRS employees on the verge of retirement, and others, not just agents tasked with audits. The IRS has an intense and laborious hiring process that is neither quick nor efficient. It can take, on average, two years for an auditor or collection agent to be released into the workplace and have taxpayer contact; most of the time, that individual will not make it through the rigorous two part training program, which means that only a fraction of those 87,000 will make it to the finish line.
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 (CI) unit of the IRS has been around since 1919. 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, CI 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 $204B will be raised, hence the "Inflation Reduction" designation.
Our US Rep. John Joyce is propagating right-wing talking points about the IRS hiring process: "Today, my House Republican colleagues and I passed the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act. This bill halts the funding for the 87,000 new IRS agents, and stops the Biden Administration from weaponizing the IRS against small businesses. '' Besides the fact that this reference to "weaponizing" is absolutely false, Rep. Joyce does not say that the passing of this proposed act would add $114B to the federal deficit, due to its hindering the IRS's ability to collect taxes. I'm sure Mr. Spahr will want to take note, as he is concerned about the rising deficit.
Republican voters should ask their representatives, senators and news providers why they are lying about this issue.
Joan D. Loewen, Lewistown