House Republicans deserve credit for honoring their commitment to vote for a repeal of the $80 billion, 87,000-agent increase for
the IRS
that Democrats shoved down the nation’s throat last year. If Republicans actually want to govern well, though, not just engage in performance art, that’s just the beginning of advisable legislative efforts regarding the IRS.
The
Democrats’ expansion of the IRS
amounted to a weaponization of unaccountable bureaucrats against ordinary citizens. By providing 14 times as many new resources for “enforcement agents” as for new customer-service representatives on the IRS helpline, and by refusing to guarantee that new auditing power would be unleashed only against those making more than $400,000 annually, Democrats are burdening plenty of
innocent, low-income workers
with falsely based investigations that citizens can’t afford to fight.
REPUBLICAN HOUSE PASSES BILL TO BLOCK BOOST FOR IRS FUNDING
That’s why the new Republican House majority was right to repeal this abusive IRS expansion in the first new bill it passed. Well-intentioned promise made, well-intentioned promise kept. Good.
Alas, the House bill has almost no chance of being passed by the Senate or signed into law by President Joe Biden. And even if, miracle of miracles, the Senate and Biden do comply, the job of good governance won’t be finished. The truth is, the IRS does need at least some new resources, even if not anywhere near the whopping $80 billion in new funds (above its former budget) in the next ten years. Furthermore, the new funds should be better directed than what the Democrats pushed for, and they should be accompanied by significant reforms in how the IRS operates.
When IRS “help” agents don’t even answer the phone nine out of every ten times a taxpayer calls, the helpline clearly is understaffed. When tax cheats get away with bilking the federal government of tens of billions of dollars (or more) annually, there obviously is a need for better efforts at collections and enforcement. That’s why at least some new funding is advisable, especially for the help desk for honest taxpayers confused by the outrageously complicated tax laws Congress has created. Indeed, it stands to reason that a significant portion of “uncollected” taxes are those unpaid not because of fraudulent intent, but because taxpayers can’t get the answers they need in order to file honest and timely “returns.”
For illustrative purposes only rather than numerical precision, the sense here is that it may be advisable to provide the IRS with $20 billion more (rather than $80 billion), but with three-fourths of those new funds going to taxpayer assistance rather than enforcement, instead of a 14-1 disparity in the other direction.
Meanwhile, the IRS needs major reforms. The IRS, by law, is supposed to abide by a “
Taxpayer Bill of Rights
,” but there is no enforcement mechanism to make the IRS comply (or to penalize IRS personnel who disregard their duties). The process by which taxpayers can appeal IRS decisions is outrageous, too. Not only is it horribly slow, but even when the original agent decision-maker rules in the taxpayer’s favor, the agent’s superiors, who remain anonymous and to whom the taxpayer can never talk, can overrule the agent who delved deeply into the case, thus leaving the taxpayer on the hook.
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There’s no accountability and almost no recourse for a mistreated taxpayer.
For all these reasons and more, if the House GOP is serious about creating a system that better serves taxpaying citizens, it will find at least some Democrats with whom to negotiate reforms and redirect revenue streams. The IRS today is an abomination. One simple, showy vote on the House floor is nowhere near enough to fix it.
