IRS On Path To Get Much Larger & More Aggressive

President Biden wants to make the Internal Revenue Service much larger and be more aggressive in going after the purported $600 billion to $1 trillion in income taxes which are said not to be paid each year. He pledged this on the campaign trail and recently got his wish with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August.

As I have stated recently, the Inflation Reduction Act by itself will NOT bring down inflation significantly, and I believe it is a terrible piece of legislation which will only add to our debt and empower the IRS and politicians in general to further undermine our freedoms.

Among the many wasteful and shameful provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act recently passed by the Democrats is an extra $80 billion for the IRS over the next 10 years. That’s more than six times its current annual budget and will boost the agency’s enforcement funding by 69% through fiscal 2031. As many as 87,000 new employees will be added to its workforce.

To put these numbers in perspective, let’s look at some quick IRS facts. The IRS currently has over 75,000 employees. Of that number, the IRS says roughly 6,500 are auditors or what the IRS calls “Representatives.”  That number seems low to me, but that’s what the IRS says. The money from the Inflation Reduction Act will allow the IRS to increase the number of auditors to 10,000 in the years ahead, according to the agency. Its annual budget is north of $13.3 billion.

The IRS says it has doubled audits of taxpayers making over $100,000 a year so far this year. The IRS has been criticized in years past for auditing more low- and middle- class taxpayers than high income Americans.

It is my strong opinion that the latest increased funding and a mandate from President Biden to go after more higher income (more productive) Americans is a weaponization of the IRS. I have no doubt the additional funding and manpower will be used to increase the harassment, silencing and prosecutions of taxpayers that the Democratic Party and the Biden administration consider threats to their power.

Gross violations of the civil liberties of taxpayers in general will become more the rule than the exception. The agency’s targeting of conservative groups looking for nonprofit tax status during the Obama era was a mere warmup for what will come under an IRS that will employ more bureaucrats than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

There are other reasons to rein in, and, as soon as possible, replace the IRS with a new arm of the state that is less abusive, whose employees are less antagonistic toward their fellow Americans, will no longer perform “root-canal audits,” will never again violate our privacy and can’t be used to crush political foes and critics of the establishment.

For instance, the system we have now which is administered by the IRS:

• Requires Americans to spend more than 6.5 billion hours complying with tax filing and reporting requirements, the equivalent to 3.1 million full-time workers doing nothing but tax return paperwork, according to the nonprofit Tax Foundation.
• Is so complex that Americans have to hire professionals to prepare their taxes, costing the ​​domestic economy more than $313 billion this year.
• Causes millions of taxpayers to waste millions of hours holding on IRS phone calls before giving up. According to the National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA), IRS “assistors” answer only 9% or 10% of the calls that come in. This is not an argument to enlarge the agency but one that clearly indicates the entire tax-collecting agency has to be overhauled.
• Operates with a “lack of transparency” which often leaves taxpayers confused and frustrated.
• Produces audits that are incorrect 60% to 90% of the time, according to the NTA.
• Obliges “citizens [to] surrender 100% of their personal privacy to the federal government in order to facilitate tax preparation,” says Daniel J. Pilla, founder of the Tax Freedom Institute.
• Assumes “you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent.”
• Drives ​​an overwhelming majority of citizens to “screw themselves into the ground to stay on top of their tax obligations,” Pilla has stated.
• Trips up Americans with a tax code which has been changed more than 5,900 times from 2001 to 2019.

Apparently congressional Republicans plan to launch immediate oversight of the Internal Revenue Service if they win control of the House next month, say media reports. This would be a start, but nowhere close to the finish, which will take years to reach. But the reversal needs to start before the IRS and the FBI join forces to become an even more powerful Gestapo operating on behalf of the Democrats.

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