Democrats and sympathetic media outlets are repeating misleading claims that a supercharged IRS with 87,000 new agents will not target lower- and middle-income earners (it will), but conveniently don’t mention that earlier this year, the agency already stepped up its scrutiny of babysitters, gardeners, and hairdressers.
That’s because earlier this year, the Biden Administration announced it would require Americans to report to the IRS all business transactions using third-party payments – like Venmo and PayPal – for goods or services over $600 thanks to a provision hidden in Democrats’ partisan $2 trillion stimulus bill from March.
- These reporting requirements ensure anyone who sells a couch or pays a babysitter electronically could trigger further IRS scrutiny.
- This violates President Biden’s own promise that greater tax enforcement wouldn’t hit lower or middle-income Americans.
- Now that Democrats have injected another $80 billion in funding for the agency, the Congressional Budget Office reports that lower- and middle-income earners will have to be audited to reach the Biden Administration’s target for new revenue.
KEY BACKGROUND:
- At least $20 billion of the revenue Democrats hope to collect from taxpayers with a supercharged IRS would come from lower- and middle-income earners and small businesses, according to a new analysis by Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper. That’s in addition to existing audits of these income levels.
- That means higher overhead for working families and small businesses merely to comply with a supercharged IRS, an agency with a long history of abuses.
READ: New Schumer-Manchin Bill Will Supercharge Long History of IRS Abuses
- Democrats voted against guardrails that would have protected lower- and middle-income taxpayers from more audits.
READ: Democrats Fail to Protect Middle Class From IRS Audits
- As the Cato Institute shows, “The Office of Management and Budget estimates that individuals and businesses currently spend 6.5 billion hours a year on federal tax paperwork, which is equivalent to 3.6 million people working full‐time on this unproductive activity. That ‘Tax Army’ is two and half times larger than our uniformed military of 1.4 million service members…”
- Given the agency’s inability to protect confidential taxpayer data over the last decade, the American people are rightly concerned about the implications of giving the IRS a vast amount of new private data.
- Republicans have introduced the Tax Gap Reform and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Enforcement Act, which allows for a better understanding of the tax gap, provides smarter enforcement, ensures the IRS uses all of the resources at its disposal, and addresses the expertise gap at the IRS.
READ: Top 10 Ways to Get Yourself Surveilled by the IRS
Original source can be found here.
