Is IRS idea worth the fight?

The Biden administration proposes to raise money to pay for its big “social infrastructure” bill in part by requiring banks to send the Internal Revenue Service annual inflow and outflow reports on all Americans’ accounts worth more than $600.

That’s very nearly all of them. The Treasury Department says such reporting would alert the IRS to wealthy taxpayers and non-payroll taxpayers whose deposits exceed their reported income, and thus help in collecting unpaid taxes.

Mostly this is about the Biden administration trying to piece together revenue-raising elements to contend that it is paying for its proposed new “social infrastructure” spending, which most experts say it’s not.

There is, not unexpectedly, great fear of any account-invasion proposal among the middle-income and low-income taxpaying public. As usual, the fear is founded largely on misinformation and misunderstanding, not to mention right-wing stoking of resentments.

These things are complicated, but this much seems currently clear: It is not true that the Biden administration wants to collect all your bank-account records. It wants only aggregate income and outgo information for a year. It does in fact want more transactional detail from common-ownership transactions, such as between an individual and a limited liability corporation of that individual.

But these kinds of things also are fluid, and fear is often based on understandable uncertainty because details are under debate and revision in the congressional process.

For example, while Republicans in Congress generally oppose the plan altogether, Democratic-led committees are talking about raising the reporting threshold to accounts valued at $10,000.

Biden’s Treasury people say they only chose $600 not to harass poor people, but to keep wealthier and savvier people from spreading accounts thin to escape suspicious balances within any single account. But $10,000 still would catch a broad American swath.

The point is that both fear of the proposal and defenses of it are based on a moving target.

These things are seldom as sinister as political opponents make them appear or as wholly pristine as political proponents make them appear.

There are people routinely depositing more income in the bank than they are reporting for income taxation. And that’s not fair to the federal treasury, which surely needs money. And it’s not fair to the people who report all their income and pay all their taxes, including the great body of payroll recipients who get all their income reportedly simply by the way payrolls work.

But there also is a presumption of innocence in this country as well as a right to protect one’s privacy and property against government invasion except for a demonstration of probable cause and the securing from a judge of a proper warrant.

Enabling the government to collect aggregate annualized deposit information on most of us in order to look for places where people are evading taxation—that’s a principle, and a good one.

On the other hand, letting the government see by regular filings the topline information on all our accounts and initiate an audit or even inquiry, and having all that personal financial data collected by a revenue agency that has been hacked in the past, and which presumably could be tapped for political-vendetta purposes—that violates or at least threatens privacy and ethics principles.

So this is a topic on which my views conflict because circumstances compete. And I am not ashamed of that. I happen to find nothing nobler among honorable persons than ambivalence.

In fact, the one thing this polarized culture needs more than anything else is a heavy dose of ambivalence.

That’s because ambivalence on issues reflects understanding and maybe a little appreciation of both sides. And that’s a bigger need for the nation right now even than recovering evaded income taxes.

Nonetheless, I lean to the views that the Biden administration doesn’t need to raise as much money as it thinks because it’s not going to pass much more than $2 trillion for social spending, if that, and certainly not the full $3.5 trillion; that not much tax money is going to be recovered this way because people who escape large amounts of taxation use some of that money for lawyers who know how to take them to the line, but not over it, and that the program won’t be worth the literal aggravation of inviting misplaced public fears of snooping and perhaps less-misplaced fears of hacking.

Fights need to be worth something, and picked on that basis. This one seems lacking as currently designed.