The IRS Is Coming For YOU And Me

Politico had more on the story: 

President Joe Biden is proposing to double the size of the IRS, by hiring nearly 87,000 new workers over the next decade, as part of a sweeping plan to chase down tax cheats.

The hiring spree, part of a bid to increase IRS funding by $80 billion, would be phased in to give the department time to adjust, the Treasury Department said in a report Thursday.

The agency’s workforce would never grow by more than a “manageable” 15 percent each year. And its total budget would increase by about 10 percent annually.

At the same time, the administration wants to require financial institutions and other businesses to report a lot more information about the money coursing through their customers’ accounts — a proposal designed to put the fear of the IRS in the hearts of tax scofflaws.

It’s part of a concerted effort by the administration to go after uncollected taxes owed by large corporations, partnerships and wealthy individuals — money Democrats want to use to finance their big-ticket spending plans.

“The president’s compliance proposals are designed to ameliorate existing inequities by focusing on high-end evasion,” the report says.

“These unpaid taxes come at a cost to American households and compliant taxpayers as policymakers choose rising deficits, lower spending on necessary priorities, or further tax increases to compensate for the lost revenue.”

National Review said this: 

President Biden recently submitted his discretionary-spending request for fiscal year 2022 to Congress. Unsurprisingly, the president is seeking more money for the Internal Revenue Service: Under the plan, the agency’s budget would grow by $1.2 billion (a 10.4 percent increase from the 2021 appropriation). Almost 65 percent of the new money is directed squarely at enforcement. According to a statement from Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, the budget “will increase resources for tax enforcement by $0.9 billion.”

Specifically, the IRS wants to hire more auditors and tax collectors — including highly specialized auditors — to focus on high-income earners, corporations, and offshore transactions. The primary goal is to close the alleged “tax gap” attributable to the top 1 percent of income earners, which is claimed to be substantially higher than previously believed.

The argument driving this thinking originates from a paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), in which the authors state that “36% of federal income taxes unpaid are owed by the top 1% [of income earners]” and that “collecting all unpaid federal income tax from this group would increase federal revenues by about $175 billion annually.”

The more government promises increased benefits to a broader segment of the population, the more desperate it becomes to collect money. And as the demand for revenue grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to break thumbs to get it. This attitude is abundantly clear in the messages sent to the public regarding the president's proposed appropriation.

What is not abundantly clear, however, is that the push to provide the IRS with more enforcement resources is driven by at least three false narratives.