House GOP: Why it’s targeting the IRS
“Regardless of how you feel about the Internal Revenue Service,” said Alexis Leondis in Bloomberg, it’s “hard to refute” that “the current system to ferret out wrongdoers is terrible.” The underfunded, understaffed agency, which relies on woefully outdated IT, fails to collect at least $500 billion in owed taxes every year. For individuals making at least $1 million annually, the audit rate fell from 8.4 percent in 2010 to just 2.4 percent in 2019, while the corporate audit rate was cut in half. “In a move that would only make it worse,” House Republicans voted last week to block most of the $80 billion allocated last year to modernize the IRS and bolster enforcement over the next decade. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the GOP plan would “increase the budget deficit by $114 billion over the next 10 years.” Fortunately, this performative bill will never get past the Democratic Senate.
Nobody’s happy that the IRS is bogged down in about 10 million unprocessed tax returns from prior years, said Noah Rothman in Commentary, or that just 13 percent of 173 million phone calls last year reached an IRS representative, after an average hold time of 29 minutes. The GOP doesn’t object to providing funds to help the IRS improve these basic services. Republicans are, however, challenging Democrats’ suspect claim that the IRS needs thousands of new agents to go after rich people and large businesses. There are just 700,000 Americans reporting over $1 million in income, and to find lots of additional tax revenue, a beefed-up IRS will have to go after the tens of millions of middle-income Americans and small businesses. “That’s where most of the money is.”
How courageous Republicans are for taking a stand against paying legally owed taxes, said Patrick T. Brown in CNN.com. But the undermanned agency—which has 33 percent fewer workers than in 1992 and faces a wave of retirements—currently focuses its audits on people making less than $50,000 a year. “Highincome taxpayers are more likely to have expert accountants and lawyers on speed dial,” making audits too expensive and time-consuming for the IRS. Since the 1990s, said Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, Republicans have deliberately gutted the IRS to benefit their wealthy donors while pushing “to increase tax-compliance requirements for low-income earners.” Now they are “insisting with a straight face” that Democrats “are the ones who want to protect rich tax cheats.”