Politics Speaker of the house...

House Republicans to vote on bill abolishing IRS, eliminating income tax

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-republicans-vote-bill-abolishing-irs-eliminating-income-tax

 

‘87,000 IRS agents’ is the zombie falsehood setting the House agenda
The Facts
Back in August, we first criticized what McCarthy called “the Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents,” saying the figure was wildly exaggerated.

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.

On Page 16 of the Treasury report, a chart shows that almost $80 billion in new resources over 10 years would allow for the hiring of 86,852 full-time employees in the next decade.

When Congress passed a bill last year with something close to that amount of money, Republicans began to claim that all these new employees were “agents.”

The Biden administration has not released its strategic plan about how it would use the money, but a little over half is targeted for enforcement. In other words, many would not be “agents” — but employees hired to improve information technology and customer service.

The IRS has about 79,000 employees, down from about 95,000 in fiscal year 2012. But the new hiring does not mean the agency’s staff will double, as some Republicans claimed during debate on the legislation. The Congressional Budget Office assumes, absent additional funding, IRS staffing would keep falling to about 60,000 in 10 years, so the funding would allow a doubling from that base, or an increase of 50 percent from today’s levels.

But Treasury officials say that because of attrition, after 10 years of increasing spending, the size of the agency should grow only 25 to 30 percent when the hiring burst is completed. In congressional testimony in 2021, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said the agency will need to “replace more than 50,000 workers lost through attrition over the next six years.”

Currently, only about 10,000 IRS employees, or about 13 percent of the total staff, are “agents,” who audit tax filings or investigate tax crimes. According to the GAO, “it takes 4 to 5 years to train a new hire to become an experienced senior or expert revenue officer.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...nts-is-zombie-falsehood-setting-house-agenda/

 

Fact-Checking the Misleading Claim About 87,000 Tax Agents
The claim, which has been debunked numerous times, has resurged ahead of the midterm elections. Here’s why it’s still wrong.

As the midterm campaigns come to a close, Republican lawmakers are seizing on misleading claims warning that Democrats are recruiting an army of tax auditors, finding new resonance in an assertion debunked months ago.

The assertion began to circulate when President Biden first outlined a wide-ranging social spending plan last fall. A whittled-down version of that plan, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, was enacted this summer, fueling a new wave of attacks that have gained momentum as the elections neared.

That law provides the Internal Revenue Service with nearly $80 billion in funding, including $45.6 billion for enforcement activities. But the suggestion that this would amount to 87,000 additional tax collectors scrutinizing the financial filings of middle-class Americans is wrong.

Here’s a fact check.

WHAT WAS SAID

“When House Republicans earn the majority, we will STOP Biden’s army of 87,000 IRS agents hired to audit hardworking American families and small businesses.”
— Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, in a tweet in November.

a May 2021 estimate from the Treasury Department of the total number of employees — not just auditors — the I.R.S. proposes to hire over the next 10 years with funding requested by Mr. Biden. And while the I.R.S. plans to conduct more audits, wealthy Americans and businesses will bear the brunt of that scrutiny, not, as Republicans have suggested, working families.

Among the I.R.S.’s work force of about 79,000 employees, 10,000 are actually agents. (Of those, 8,000 are revenue agents who audit tax filings and 2,000 are special agents who investigate potential tax crimes.) In fact, the two most common I.R.S. jobs have little to do with tax auditing or investigations: about 13,000 are customer service representatives who answer taxpayer phone calls and 10,000 are seasonal employees who file mail or transcribe data. Other jobs include lawyers, examiners, technicians and appeals officers.

The additional funding for to the I.R.S. will allow the agency to modernize its infrastructure and replace an aging work force, and it is unclear just how many full-time employees or agents will be hired in the next decade, Treasury Department officials said. The majority of those new employees will replace the 52,000 expected to retire in the near future, the officials said, and many will focus on customer service and updating the agency’s technology infrastructure — not investigating the finances of ordinary Americans.



In other words, the funding will enable the I.R.S. to increase its work force over the next 10 years to 113,000 employees. That is about the same number of workers it employed annually in the early 1990s.

In a September speech, Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, outlined some of that hiring — an additional 5,000 customer service representatives and fully staffing the agency’s taxpayer assistance centers — and committed to not raise audit rates for households making under $400,000 a year.

Using historical audit rates, House Republicans estimated this summer that the additional funding will correspond to 710,000 new audits for taxpayers making $75,000 or less — as Ms. Smiley, the Republican candidate for Senate in Washington State, tweeted. But those calculations ignore the proportional effect on each income bracket.

In the past decade, tax audit rates have fallen most starkly for higher income earners, which the I.R.S. attributes to diminished resources and therefore its inability to retain specialized auditors needed to examine the filings of the wealthy.

Increasing funding for the I.R.S., the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in September 2021, would address those needs and result in increased audit rates for everyone, particularly for high-income earners.

The I.R.S. examined 1.4 million individual income tax returns in 2010, about 1 percent of the total number filed. In 2018, the latest year with available data when Republicans started making these claims, audits decreased to 370,000, or about 0.2 percent.

The budget office estimated increasing I.R.S. funding would return enforcement to its 2010 levels. Doing so would result in about 1.2 million more audits; of those, 583,000 would target people making less than $75,000.

statement in support of the law released this summer, three former I.R.S. commissioners appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents disputed claims about increased scrutiny. The law would add “the capacity to enforce the tax laws against sophisticated taxpayers who today evade their tax obligations freely,” they said, “because they know that the I.R.S. lacks the tools it needs to pursue them.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/06/us/politics/irs-agents-fact-check.html

 

No, Those 87,000 New IRS Agents Are Not about to Break Down Your Door

We have all recently heard that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is hiring 87,000 new agents and have seen the various reactions to this news. As tax attorneys, we have received more than our fair share of ice-breaker comments on what this means for us and how busy we will be. What this doesn’t mean is that 87,000 IRS agents are going to come break down your door and force you to allocate for all of your Venmo accounts on the spot. Ordinary taxpayers have no idea what actually goes into hiring a single IRS agent, let alone 87,000 agents over multiple years to try to reduce the labor backlog.

Most people think that hiring 87,000 IRS agents is a large amount and that they will be pumping out business and individual audits at an unprecedented speed. What most people do not understand is that this 87,000 has to be spread across hundreds of IRS departments, meaning 87,000 is a small number for a federal agency that has been severely understaffed for years. It can take, on average, two years for an auditor or collection agent to be released into the wild and have taxpayer contact; most of the time, that individual will not make it through the rigorous two training program, which means that only a fraction of those 87,000 will make it to the finish line.

Regardless of the above commentary, it really will be a great move for the IRS to hire all these individuals regardless of whether they adequately plug all the staffing holes at the IRS. Further, owing to the nature of the staff shortage and the recent ramp-up of audits of top earners, this will hopefully bring some balance to the individuals and businesses flying under the radar because there is no ability for the IRS even to audit a fraction of the taxpayers in the United States. If the IRS can pull off its hiring spree, it is projected to collect an additional $10 billion or more in revenue.

The other hurdle that the IRS will face outside of employee retention is actually being able to hire that many new faces. The IRS has an intense and laborious hiring process that is neither quick nor efficient. The original bill granting the IRS the additional funds to beef up its labor force contained important language (untimely removed from the final bill) that would have allowed the IRS to fast-track the hiring process instead of relying on the current process. The IRS has 25,000 feweremployees than it did two decades ago, and not only does it need to fast-track its human resources process, but it also needs to be competitive in the pay and benefits it offers in this tight job market.

The IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) releases a yearly report on how efficient the IRS has been at handling taxpayer matters. In 2019 TAS had set a goal of filling vacant positions within 80 days, but in reality, it was taking 120 days, given that a worldwide pandemic overturned life as we know it. The IRS had planned to hire 5,500 individuals for tax year 2022, but only 3,400 were hired.

The exact outcome and impact of hiring 87,000 individuals are still unknown, and it will be interesting to see if it leads to the IRS and other government agencies realizing that they need to increase IRS hiring numbers (beyond their current employment) and overall budget to allow this federal agency to run anywhere near efficiently and effectively—not only for itself but for all U.S. taxpayers.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/...-new-irs-agents-are-not-break-down-your-door/

 

They can vote on dog shit if they want, the Senate won't pass it.