Oh, those poor dears at the IRS.
They wasted $50 million on 225 conferences between 2010 and 2012, including a single $4.1 million conference in Anaheim, Calif.
They wasted $50,000 creating bad videos on the clock, including one of the worst Star Trek parodies in the history of the Internet.
They gave raises and bonuses to employees who hadn’t paid their own taxes.
They were caught targeting applicants for nonprofit status based on their ideology and potential opposition to President Obama. They lied to Congress about being unable to recover emails from those involved.
Yet somehow, the bureaucrats of the IRS have managed to make themselves seem like sympathetic figures in the media. They even snookered comedian John Oliver into doing an entire segment on how cuts to their budget were bad for America. Yet like most of the excuses that IRS bureaucrats have made over the years, it simply wasn’t true.
Ahead of tax season, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen warned that taxpayers would suffer longer waits on the phone, receive less help from the agency, and experience a delay in refunds because of the budget cuts Congress passed – cuts that came after years of IRS budget increases. “Without additional customer service funding,” the agency warned in a report published last May, “almost half of all calls will not be answered in 2015 due to projected increases in demand anticipated by the Affordable Care Act.”
But according to a new report by the House Ways and Means Committee, these inconveniences were the result of IRS malingering – of budgetary choices made within the agency itself. As the Washington Examiner‘s Sarah Westwood reported last week, the IRS is blessed each year with $500 million in user fees that it is free to spend on its own operations. But in choosing how to spend the money, the agency’s bureaucracy blew off its core mission in favor of cutting $60 million in bonus checks for employees and putting $23.5 million toward activities by its employee union, among other things.
“Spending decisions entirely under the IRS’s control led to 16 million fewer taxpayers receiving IRS assistance this filing season,” said the report. “Other spending choices, including prioritizing employee bonuses and union activity on the taxpayer’s dime, used up resources that otherwise could have been used to assist another 10 million taxpayers.”
This is a classic example of how federal bureaucrats take revenge when their budgets are cut. Instead of prioritizing limited resources in order to fulfill their agencies’ missions, they find ways to transfer the maximum amount of pain directly to taxpayers, so as to teach the country a lesson about how indispensable they are. So much the better if they can enrich themselves and reduce their workload in the process.
Congress should reward the bureaucrats in a language they understand — with new restrictions on how they spend agency money — and not with an undeserved budget increase.
