The IRS Bleeds
What will a gutted IRS look like? The Internal Revenue Service—my own personal most-hated government agency—appears to be in hot water this tax season, mostly due to cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
You might recall that in 2021, the IRS was authorized to hire 87,000 new tax collectors and tax-related bureaucrats over the next decade, with an increase in funding sent their way by then-President Joe Biden. And in 2022, this became a political scandal (especially around these parts), because Biden and many of his Democratic bedfellows claimed that audit rates on households making $400,000 or less would not go up, just as some of them were cutting provisions in the actual legislation that tried to codify such assurances.
It’s not clear they ever really did hire all those new agents and paper-filers; the IRS remains a little under 100,000 strong, hiring 19,482 total employees in fiscal year 2024. But the agency suffers from retention issues: About 10,000 employees left that same year.
Now there’s a new sheriff in town, and some 7,000 IRS employees have been laid off from the agency under DOGE, hitting the “large business and international” division especially hard, per reporting from The New York Times. This means more complex audits might struggle to be completed—or might never start!—while the easiest-to-conduct audits on the poorest taxpayers might be prioritized.
Though all I want in this world is to never be audited by the men with guns, there’s a clear issue presented for budget balancers: What will happen to federal revenue if the IRS ceases to do its job? And what will happen when customer service is made even worse? Will we toil to pay the right amount without any help from the government agents who are demanding we do so?
Another odd nugget: Normally, IRS commissioners stay in place even as administrations change. But President Donald Trump decided to dismiss the old commissioner, Daniel Werfel, whose term was not set to expire for another two years, replacing him with the former Missouri congressman Billy Long, an inexperienced figure who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate.
To be clear, I’m a big fan of the Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) proposal, eloquently framed as “blow up the tax code and start over,” in which we replace the incomprehensibly complex system with a flat tax. Or the idea of making the tax code so simple that you can file your taxes on a postcard—a common Republican talking point circa 2017. (These types of changes would, to be clear, have to happen at the congressional level.) But what Trump is pursuing appears to be something different altogether: Slash the auditors who might crack down on larger businesses w
Article from Reason.com
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