Those 87,000 Tax Enforcers Don’t Exist

Being the rare kind of crazy that I am, I decided to spend Saturday reading the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, better described as the Climate Change Agenda 2030 Wish List of 2022. I hit an interesting snag: while the conservative world is abuzz about the new 87,000 armed IRS agents authorized by the Act…

…They aren’t in the Act. I may have misread it… it’s 725 pages with no index or table of contents, and the changes it makes are typically typographical alterations to other texts of other bills as amended into the United States Code, which intentionally makes them nearly impossible to comprehend. But after several scans and keyword searches, I didn’t find it. This excerpt is more typical:

h ttps://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22122279-inflation-reduction-act-of-2022

Starting Page 33

For necessary expenses of the Internal Revenue Service to support taxpayer services and enforcement programs, including rent payments; facilities services; printing; postage; physical security; headquarters and other IRS-wide administration activities; research and statistics of income; telecommunications; information technology development, enhancement, operations, maintenance, and security; the hire of passenger motor vehicles; the operations of the Internal Revenue Service Oversight Board; and other services as authorized by 5 U.S.C. 3109, at such rates as may be determined by the Commissioner, $25,326,400,000, to remain available until September 30, 8 2031

5 U.S.C. 3109 is the temporary hiring of experts and consultants. They do talk about operations and site security but that doesn’t sound like the banksters getting a private army.

What’s up? I finally sourced the number to an IRS modernization proposal:

THE AMERICAN FAMILIES PLAN TAX COMPLIANCE AGENDA

h ttps://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-American-Families-Plan-Tax-Compliance-Agenda.pdf

May 2021

I can’t even do a screen cap, it’s such a wall of badly formatted numbers, but look on Page 16 and know that “FTE” means “full-time employees”. The hiring is spread over 10 years and not specific to tax enforcement.

So, the 87,000 armed IRS goons is a false threat. The scare goes back to a tweet by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Seems that nobody checked him. Granted, these bills are written specifically to not be readable, assuming they’re even finished at the moment of passage, but whose fault is that? Looking at YOU, high-ranking careerist Republicans!

In fact, I’ll go one step better and explain why you shouldn’t be worried at all about IRS modernization: incompetence and plutocracy.

Democrats. $80 billion wager: A bigger IRS will be a better IRS

h ttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/06/inflation-reduction-act-irs/

By Jacob Bogage, 6 August 2022

The bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, would put $80 billion toward beefing up the IRS, in line with liberals. long-term goals to strengthen tax collection and enforcement on corporations and high-income earners, while relieving low-income taxpayers of cumbersome and frightening audits. Some of the additional revenue would go to pay for the largest-ever U.S. investment in clean energy technology.

The idea is that the government could bring in more money by examining corporate and high-income returns than it does by pursuing lower- or middle-income taxpayers who make mistakes on their returns or underpay their taxes by small amounts. The IRS in recent years has grown more dependent on those types of audits because they are relatively inexpensive: They’re automated, and they preserve the agency’s limited personnel resources. But they also mostly fall on taxpayers who can’t afford to fight back by spending hours on the phone with the tax agency or hiring lawyers.

…More than 4 in 10 of its [2021] audits targeted recipients of the earned income tax credit, one of the country’s main anti-poverty measures.

Oh no no no, they didn’t do that because it was inexpensive. The auditors chose the simplest audits… a one-line tax credit…because they’re incompetent, lazy and chosen for di-worsity. Should they audit Bezos’ lucrative yet well-defended empire? Or, audit ten EITC tax credits then go back to your soap operas on Hulu? “I did ten audits today, boss!”

On top of that, once the plutocrats got established, they weren’t interested in a strong IRS that was capable of causing them trouble:

Lookit that, a Federal government that didn’t like its own taxmen for an entire decade. Who would ever have thought to see it?

Of course, now that there’s no green left in the pig trough, boosting tax revenue has become an urgent problem. But I read the Inflation Act. They’re planning to go after cryptocurrencies… rather bad timing on that, the numbers from Coinbase don’t suggest a lot of capital gains for this year… and automate tax reporting so that audits no longer get triggered by basic math mistakes.

Yours or theirs.

Speaking at a news conference Wednesday, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the head of the Senate Republican Conference, said the proposed spending would “put the IRS on steroids” and in total amounted to about .a million per IRS agent..

.You don’t need that many IRS agents to go after a few people they say are very, very rich,. Barrasso said, adding that it would hit .families, farmers and the small businesses of Americans, that’s who’s going to bear the burden of this legislation..

But experts say that’s a condition brought about largely by GOP policies, which drove the IRS into more audits of poorer taxpayers by depriving the agency of the resources it would have taken to go after wealthier targets who shelter potentially much higher sums.

Wealthier targets such as Nancy Pelosi’s stock-trading husband. You see the IRS’ problem.

It’s a condition brought about by a refusal to match what the Bushes and Bidens are willing to pay for top-shelf tax talent. IRS doesn’t need 87,000 new employees being paid by the GS scale. It needs 1,000 new employees each being paid >$1M to go after the crime families. Employees exempt from all forms of D.I.E. harassment and supervision by politically-appointed department heads.

Which will happen the week after Christ inaugurates His Millennial Kingdom, or when pigs fly, depending on your religious beliefs.

In conclusion, nothing has changed in Tax World. IRS will continue to squeeze blood from turnips because the plutocrats who wrote the laws to ensure they never pay their fair share, will have no idea why their puppet regime is bankrupt.