Liar, liar: Back in August 2022, when some of us were fresh-faced and naive, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assured us that their $80 billion infusion of cash (over the course of a decade, so they could hire some 87,000 new workers, including but not limited to men with guns) would actually be a means of targeting millionaire and billionaire scofflaws, not ordinary middle-class earners.
At the time, I voiced skepticism: Correspondence audits and other audits on low- and middle-income earners are simply the easiest to conduct. The IRS has historically spent an awful lot of time targeting these groups, not monied tax dodgers who can hire teams of accountants, so why would this time be different?
Vindicated: “The Internal Revenue Service got an audit of its own in time for Tax Day, and two irregularities jump out,” reports The Wall Street Journal, having labored through the latest Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA)
Stephan, I am rarely disappointed in you, but I am today. Reason is a far right propaganda rag, as is the WSJ. The article is short, breezy and thin on contextualized facts. I don’t know the truth of the matter, but I am not inclined to place any faith in this reporting.
Lawrence —
You have made several important mistakes in your comment. First, this piece comes from the Reason Foundation, not the Wall Street Journal. They simply cite some research, which is accurately cited in the WSJ. Second, the piece is not “short, breezy, and thin,” as you assert. It provides a fact-based account of what is happening with the IRS and, if you follow the click-throughs, you get even more fact-based information. It is the best report I have seen of what is happening.
The IRS report cited, see:
https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2024-03/2024ier010fr.pdf
Goal #3 was the auditing of complex, high wealthy taxpayers, and corporations. On page 19 of this report it indicated that the IRS was making progress on each aspect of the goal. Although, I am generally a skeptic regarding governmental operations, and sympathetic to the article’s content, given the complexity of these returns and the expertise needed to evaluate them I am inclined to cut the IRS some slack as their bench of experts have been purposefully depleted.That said, what is most important is the following:
” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was a bit sassier. “Contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited,” she wrote in a letter to Rettig.”
The most disturbing part is:
“The IRS had set a goal of hiring 3,700 new agents in the first year of boosted funding. Instead, in the first six months, they’d hired 34.
Awkwardly, “revenue agent staffing had actually decreased by 8%, or more than 650 employees, between the end of fiscal 2019 and March 2023,” per a previous watchdog report. And it’s not just hiring that’s in trouble: The agency has completed just 33 percent of its fiscal year 2023 milestones outlined in its strategic operating plan, which is…tough given that the year is over.”
We will have to give this administration a chance to implement what was promised. If another year goes by and only a handful of agents are hired for this initiative, then we can look to declare it a failure and the administrations word hollow.