Democrats enhanced IRS habit of targeting poor people, not millionaires
Quin Hillyer
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A new report from a Syracuse University study group reemphasizes the likelihood that the 87,000 new IRS agents funded by congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden will harass low-income taxpayers the most.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a highly reputable research outlet, reports, to quote the headline of its Jan. 4 report, that the “IRS audits few millionaires but targeted many low-income families in FY 2022.” More specifically, according to the TRAC Syracuse report, “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.”
VOTERS SHOULD NEVER FORGIVE DEMOCRATS’ DANGEROUS IRS EXPANSION
Indeed, the IRS’s audit system is set up in a way that makes it almost inevitable that low-income earners, not millionaires, get harmed the most by audits, sometimes losing money not because the IRS found them to be gaming the system but because they don’t have the resources to comply with the audit demands.
As National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins reported to Congress, low-income earners have what TRAC Syracuse summarized as “complex issues inherently involved with substantiating the anti-poverty earned income tax credit.” Thus, now directly quoting Collins, “The IRS correspondence audit process is structured to expend the least amount of resources to conduct the largest number of examinations — resulting in the lowest level of customer service to taxpayers having the greatest need for assistance.”
When Democrats in Congress last year, against unanimous Republican opposition, voted to give the IRS another $80 billion for those 87,000 new agents, it provided no mechanisms to fix this problem, which means there is a near certainty that the disparity harming low-income earners will not just remain in place but actually be exacerbated. Indeed, as conservative writer Deroy Murdock stressed in numerous columns, Democrats unanimously rejected an amendment that would “prevent the use of additional Internal Revenue Service Funds from being used for audits of taxpayers with taxable incomes below $400,000.”
In addition to targeting low-income earners, the audits likely will snatch $20 billion away from middle-class taxpayers, some of whom also, as with the low-income earners, will be guilty not of fraud but of insufficient resources to fight mistaken IRS assumptions.
TRAC Syracuse also reported that Collins “further faulted the IRS for only providing these [low- and mid-income] individuals with a generic toll-free telephone number … where the public rarely can get through to speak with anyone knowledgeable to actually assist them.”
For two years running, only about 10% of all taxpayer calls to the IRS help line were ever answered by any agent.
All of this makes the IRS more of a moblike shakedown organization than like a reasonable instrument of even-handed, legal collections. Because of the new law passed by Democrats alone last year, this moblike operation surely will get even worse. The situation is a travesty, bordering on a crime.
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