The Internal Revenue Service announced its plans to hire more than 30,000 new employees in an apparent effort to tax the wealthy.
On Thursday, the IRS revealed details on how it plans to use an infusion of $80 billion for technological advancement, customer service enhancement, real-time notifications, the provision of top-tier customer service, and combating the “tax gap” by bolstering the scrutiny of wealthy individuals.
The new IRS commissioner, Daniel Werfel, said that the money from the Democrats’ controversial “Inflation Reduction Act” will not go toward funding for new agents with guns, despite some Republicans’ unfounded claims to the contrary.
Some improvements, including shifting more paper-based systems online and immediately returning taxpayers’ phone calls, have been anticipated for a while. Others are more ambitious, such as the ongoing research into how to develop a government-run computerized free-file tax return system.
Since President Joe Biden signed the measure last August, some GOP lawmakers have claimed that the IRS would use the money to hire an army of 87,000 tax agents with weapons.
“The last thing the American people need right now are more audits from an out-of-control, bloated IRS,” said Nebraska Rep. Adrian Smith at the time. “The Inflation Act funding for IRS would lead to the hiring of 87,000 new IRS employees tasked with raising enough revenue to pay for Democrats’ Green New Deal priorities.”
Despite the agency’s promise to tax the wealthy, there is still a discrepancy between taxing the rich and low-income individuals.
“Barring an unlikely significant change in the composition of IRS enforcement, the stepped-up IRS enforcement would subject taxpayers across the income spectrum to more scrutiny and greater audit risk,” the Heritage Foundation said in a recent blog post.
The IRS, meanwhile, has maintained that it will not increase audits on households earning less than $400,000 if the $80 billion in funding is approved.
“These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” former IRS commissioner Charles Rettig wrote in a letter to lawmakers on Thursday. “As we have been planning, our investment of these enforcement resources is designed around Treasury’s directive that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.”
