When a private company is reckless with your personal information, you have the option, at least in theory, of refusing to do business with that company.
But what about the government? You must pay taxes, and that leaves you with no choice. You must share extensive personal information with the government when you file a return.
This is why the rules surrounding IRS secrecy are so strict. But then, and here’s a big surprise, the government lets you down.
This month, government bureaucrats made a particularly egregious and illegal leak of IRS information, all for political purposes.
The tax returns of thousands of affluent private citizens, including Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg, and Carl Icahn, were released to the media, apparently by malicious bureaucrats. The fact that many of these individuals have propagated odious leftist political views does not matter. No one deserves to be violated in this manner by Uncle Sam.
If taxpayers at any income level are ever to feel any confidence about the security of the information they provide to the government, then the perpetrators of this crime must be identified, arrested, fired, shamed, fined, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They must spend time in prison — several years, or even decades, as much as prosecutors can possibly arrange. These criminals must not be given plea deals. This is a clear case in which the criminals must be made into an example for others.
Even without malicious IRS bureaucrats, government is already a far less reliable and responsible steward of everyone’s personal information than any honest retail business. It has repeatedly proven as much. Even if every private company in the United States were perfectly fastidious about preventing the leak of personal information (and they have not been), government bureaucracy has already done so much damage in this regard, especially due to one of the Obama administration’s worst unsung scandals, that there probably isn’t a soul between Washington and Wuhan who doesn’t already have enough information to apply for a fraudulent credit card in your name.
All on its own, that is already a sufficient argument to demonstrate that the federal government has no business even levying an income tax on individual earners. Income taxes require the sharing of too much sensitive personal information with an untrustworthy government partner.
This applies all the more in cases where left-leaning bureaucrats have, in addition to their own incompetence, actual political motivations to expose personal information in order to humiliate and embarrass people with the wrong political opinions, and that applies whether those opinions are on the Left or on the Right.
It does not matter that the victims of this crime were wealthy. This egregious violation of taxpayer privacy illustrates once again that the government cannot be trusted and that the nation should move away from forcing citizens to report personal earnings.
As for the supposed “lesson” of this revelation, it is irrelevant. It is not the fault of Jeff Bezos or anyone else that the tax code is so stupidly designed that people with high incomes can pay very little in taxes. There is an answer to this. The replacement of the personal income tax with a flat tax or, even better, a consumption tax, would instantaneously solve this problem while simultaneously eliminating the problem of having to share personal information with an untrustworthy IRS bureaucracy, which demonstrated under President Barack Obama just how toxic and untrustworthy it really is.
What’s most embarrassing about this scandal is that Joe Biden is expecting to raise a comically large sum of money by hiring tens of thousands of additional IRS employees.
If this new scandal teaches us anything, it is that Biden has the wrong idea. The new leak demonstrates that the hiring of new IRS bureaucrats to solve tax compliance problems is akin to hiring the coronavirus to oversee public health. Congress must not reward the toxicity and incompetence of the IRS with a bigger budget.
