Republicans first said the IRS was hiring 87,000 new armed IRS CI agents. Well, that was such a ridiculous claim that everyone knew it was false. Then they said it was 87,000 IRS agents. Nope, that’s a rubbish claim too. It’s actually 87,000 new IRS employees hired in the coming ten years. After decades of underfunding of the IRS by both parties.
This will allow the IRS to better audit wealthy taxpayers and large businesses, who can afford battalions of lawyers. It takes several years just to train IRS agents to be able to handle such cases. And complicated cases can take months, sometimes years to resolve.
But Republicans sure want to stop the IRS from investigating potential tax fraud among the rich. Now why do you suppose that is?
House Republiacans will be passing all sorts of silly bills that have no chance of getting past the Senate or Biden. It’s just performative bullshit for them.
The figure had been plucked from a Treasury report released in May 2021 about how the administration hoped to address the “tax gap” — the difference between what is owed to the government and what is actually paid. That difference was thought to be at least $381 billion a year, with most of it due to underreporting of income, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.
One major problem is that the IRS does not have enough experienced revenue agents who can tackle complex tax returns. In a May report last year, the Government Accountability Office said audit rates have declined dramatically for the super rich. In 2010, more than 21 percent of tax returns reporting more than $10 million in income were audited — and that dropped to 3.9 percent by 2019, the GAO said.