Editorial: America, the IRS is the good guy; tax cheats are the bad guys

This one’s easy. Feed the IRS.

“Starve the beast” has long been a Republican rallying cry to make government smaller and less invasive, and the Internal Revenue Service has been a constant target.

Republican lawmakers have taken great pride in fighting to reduce tax rates for big business and high-earning individuals (while doing comparatively little for low- and middle-class Americans). And while doing that, they’ve drained the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to collect even those reduced taxes on the wealthy.

As a result, we have a government agency in 2022, as Kiplinger.com notes, whose computers rely on COBOL — a more-than 50-year-old computer programming language. As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote in August, after a visit to the agency’s Austin, Texas offices:

“As of July 29, the IRS had a backlog of 10.2 million unprocessed individual returns. Blame the pandemic, sure, but also the agency’s embarrassingly outdated, paper-based system, which leaves stacks and stacks of returns cluttering shelves, hallways and even the cafeteria.... Paper tax returns aren’t scanned into computers; instead, IRS employees manually keystroke the numbers from each document into the system, digit by digit.”

And yet, we’re still hearing complaints from conservatives, that President Joe Biden was wrong to sign an Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 that included $80 billion over 10 years for the IRS. And we’re hearing outrage propagated by politicians who should know better, that the agency is poised to hire 87,000 new agents to unleash a torrent of unfair audits of poor and middle-class Americans.

That's a lie. In fact, there’s no plan to add 87,000 agents. That number, Kiplinger.com said, appears to come from a 2021 IRS estimate of how many employees of all kinds it would take to fill empty slots and keep pace with retirements and other departures. The agency has 25,000 fewer agents than it had at the turn of the millennium, and is projected to lose as many as 50,000 more in the next few years.

The number of new agents brought on board has not been specified but would be a fraction of that 87,000. And there’s no plan to go after the poor or middle-class, the agency has indicated. It’s the wealthy who’ve been let off the hook in recent years, not just because Republican tax cuts favored them but because starving the agency makes it harder to go after high-end, complex tax cases like that of ex-President Trump, that could claw back more government revenue – and reduce the need to raise taxes on everyone else.

But you won’t hear Republicans in Congress applauding strengthened tax enforcement. As noted on the business and politics news website, Government Executive, Florida’s own Sen. Rick Scott, the richest U.S. senator, penned a letter urging Americans not to apply for the IRS positions. “We will immediately do everything in our power to defund this insane and unwarranted expansion of government into the lives of the American people,” Scott wrote.

In a letter to constituents in November, Sen. John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, wrote of IRS “bureaucratic red tape,” “mismanagement of agency data,” “250 million phone calls to the IRS that employees failed to answer,” and of the threat of “a supersized IRS.”

Thune spoke of his valiant efforts to freeze or rescind the money unless the agency submits a plan to Congress' liking on how to spend it. “More than half of the funding is directed toward enforcement, including audits, and only four percent goes toward improving customer service,” Thune complained. Clearly, he’s more concerned that the agency answers the phone promptly than collect the billions of dollars it is owed − rather, that we are owed.

It's pretty clear that, prior to the Inflation Reduction Act, the unresponsive bureaucracy was Congress and not the IRS.

Nobody’s going to argue that the IRS, like any government agency, couldn’t be more efficient. But it’s hard to be efficient when you don't get the resources to do your job.

And let’s be honest. Does anyone really believe that Republicans in Congress want the IRS to do its job? Are they really upset that "Joe Middle Class" isn’t getting calls returned? Or, are they mainly using their IRS complaints as cover for tax cuts for wealthy constituents and corporate donors, and to starve the agency so it can’t go after tax cheats?

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Editorial: Boost to IRS budget, staffing is key to efficient taxation