America depends on the Internal Revenue Service to collect revenues from a “mostly voluntary system of tax compliance,” but this is being impeded by Republican lawmakers who won’t stop “picking on” the struggling federal agency, the Washington Post’s editorial board argued this week.
“The House has passed a series of sniping, counterproductive measures picking on the IRS,” they wrote. “One [measure] would limit how it spends the user fees it collects. Another would freeze hiring at the understaffed agency until it obtains certification that no one there has major tax debt. The dumbest would mandate that no one at the IRS could get a bonus until customer service improves.”
Notably absent from the Post editorial is any mention of the IRS’s admitted targeting of conservative groups.
The problem at the IRS is not exactly mismanagement, or that it once hunted Tea Party groups, but that it’s underfunded, the board explained.
“[W]ho is responsible for the decline of customer service at the IRS? House Republicans. The IRS budget is $500 million below its level in 2010, the year that Republicans won control of the House. It has been forced to shed 17,000 workers,” they wrote. “Meanwhile, its responsibilities have increased. More people are filing taxes. The agency has to administer key parts of the Affordable Care Act. Cyberthreats have skyrocketed, including instances of identity theft.”
The Post’s charge comes not long after IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a House panel in February that Congress’ failure to fund the Affordable Care Act had hurt his agency’s ability to deal with both cybersecurity threats as well as customer service issues.
Attempts to downsize and rollback the IRS has been one of the “most foolish” platforms adopted by the GOP, the Post argued.
By going after the IRS, Republicans are encouraging and rewarding “tax cheats.”
Also, by “picking on the IRS,” there have been fewer audits, which led to a “loss” of an estimated $8 billion for the government in 2015.
“Honest people are harmed, too. Several customer service metrics plummeted for a time, until Congress relented a bit and gave the agency a little more money, after which at least telephone service improved for this tax season,” the Post editorial board wrote. “But customer service in some other areas is still astonishingly poor. The agency, for example, admits that it is failing to answer a third of the written correspondence it gets quickly enough, even though the goal is to get back to people within 45 days, which is itself an unacceptably long time.”
It’s not a surprise that Republicans chose April to “harry” the IRS, they added. After all, it’s the month where everyone needs to file their taxes.
“But the solution to the IRS’s problems is not more punishment, particularly of the sort that is likely to inhibit its ability to hire competent employees,” the board wrote. “The answer is for lawmakers to give the agency the money it needs to do its job. The country relies on a mostly voluntary system of tax compliance. If respect for and cooperation with that system decline, the government will lose the very revenue Congress expects the IRS to collect — and on which lawmakers’ budgets depend.”
