In its infinite wisdom – or lack thereof – Congress recently gave the U.S. Internal Revenue Service $80 billion in new funding as part of the Inflation Reduction Act before the agency had a plan for spending it.
It’s typical for Washington to do things that way – provide the funding first, figure out how to spend it second. That’s not in the American taxpayers’ interest but it works for the bureaucrats. Giving the IRS more money without specifying how it will be spent is akin to giving more power to a megalomaniac. The odds it will be abused are not just high, but near certainty.
IRS chief Danny Werfel, who appeared recently before the House Committee on Ways and Means, said nothing to put anyone at ease. Taxpayers fear his agency, and rightly so. It has immense power it uses ruthlessly. Ask any honest, blameless taxpayer who’s gotten a dunning letter whether their first thought was to fight or pay up.
It’s easier and cheaper to submit and settle. In tax court, the burden falls on the accused to prove their innocence. Putting the IRS on trial, even if you’re innocent, is too expensive a proposition for most Americans to consider.
Someone somewhere probably should someday. The agency’s reputation has been tarnished – insiders might think it was burnished – by recent scandals in which private taxpayer information was leaked to partisan interest groups and the press and involving senior officials who played politics with the power to grant non-profit status to organizations seeking to participate in the marketplace of ideas.
There’s probably a lot more going on behind the walls of the IRS’s imposing, fortress-like Constitution Avenue headquarters than Wefel and other senior leaders would like anyone to know. Transparency is not its long suit. A few issues are festering, as the pro-taxpayer group Americans for Tax Reform reminded congressional leaders before Werfel went to Capitol Hill. One involves the destruction of 30 million of what the think tank called “active taxpayer paper documents” it held at its Ogden, Utah facility.
No one at the IRS will tell Congress how it destroyed the documents, the groups said, chock full of sensitive, private, personal financial information that, if stacked one page on top of another would form a pile rising two miles into the air.
Of course, no one at the IRS told Congress the documents were going to be destroyed either. The destruction was discovered, Americans for Tax Reform said, only after a walk-through of the Utah facility by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Inspector for Tax Administration. The agency still refuses to supply lawmakers with internal memos providing details on what happened.
It’s maddening, and not just because of the government’s apparent malfeasance. No taxpayer in America could get away with destroying documents the IRS wanted to see – even if they didn’t know any of its auditors, agents, or administrators wanted to see them.
Worse things are already in the pipeline – like using the $80 billion in new funding it gets over the next decade to hire 87,000 new agents, auditors, and other personnel. That would, as Pennsylvania GOP Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick got Wefel to confirm, make the IRS “larger than the entire State Department, the entire Border Patrol, the entire Pentagon, and the entire FBI.” Think about that. Larger than the Pentagon and the Border Patrol and those other agencies? For what possible reason? It doesn’t make sense unless there’s a plan in the works to impose taxes that require us to account for our total worth and annual spending as well as income. Like a wealth tax or a Value Added Tax, which Americans for Tax Reform head Grover G. Norquist likes to quip “Is French for money machine.”
Having tax levies like that in mind might explain why the IRS was recently advertising for new hires “willing to use force up to and including the use of deadly force.” That level of intrusiveness would make a lot of otherwise reasonable people very mad.
Werfel assured Congress when he testified that not all the new 87,000 agents would be armed, but one wonders. Empowered by the influx of $80 billion in new funding to go after what Joe Biden and other Democrats refer to as tax cheats, it’s easy to see how things going forward might get heated.
