The Schumer-Manchin bill doubles the size and power of the IRS. The bill provides no safeguards for taxpayers or any accountability for the often-abusive agency.
The IRS has proven itself to be incompetent, bloated, and corrupt. Doubling its size so that more working Americans can be harassed and have their sensitive information mishandled or even destroyed is an initiative that will harm small businesses and working households.
A big part of doubling the size of the IRS is hiring 87,000 new agents. These agents are not the nice people who answer the phone when you are trying to file. The bill provides 14 times the quantity of money for “enforcement” – which means audits – than it does for “taxpayer services” – such as actually picking up the phone.
Rather, these are the agents that will target small businesses and working Americans. These audits are time consuming and often don’t bear fruit. Audits rarely cost the subject less than $10,000, a nearly insurmountable expense for most middle-class Americans and small business owners, whose audit rate will increase by 50%.
A typical small business audit can take 2-3 years. After getting battered the past three years by government-imposed shutdowns and supply chain problems, the last thing Main Street needs is to get buried with new fishing expeditions from the IRS.
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Most of the new agents will also join the IRS union which gives 100% of its PAC contributions to Democrats. The IRS union gives to the same party that is trying with all its might to shovel more taxpayer dollars to the agency which will find their way back into Democratic coffers.
The agents that would conduct these audits have proven to be incompetent. When you are forced to call the IRS to correct one of their many mistakes, an agent will only pick up roughly 11% of the time. That’s almost nine in ten calls to the IRS which go unanswered. The Schumer-Manchin bill will only increase the number of incoming calls as honest small business owners seek guidance.
The bill also calls for new funding for IRS “office rent.” The agency already has excess office space as 53% of IRS agents never set foot into an office. They permanently "work from home." If anything, the agency should be looking to downsize their real estate presence to save taxpayer dollars.
When the agents go out to audit small businesses, they do not even bother to properly log their own car use. In fact, the criminal investigation division has more cars than it does agents. Many agents are assigned an official vehicle when they are either not qualified for one or a vehicle is simply not needed.
When these agents get a car, they are prone to abuse the privilege. In one small sample audit, the IRS watchdog found that three IRS special agents logged between 95,000 and 272,000 miles in one year in an agency-issued car. The suggested utilization criteria is 7,200 miles per year.
With the level to which vehicle use and mileage is scrutinized in the IRS’ audits, one has to question whether they would even pass one of their own audits.
Because when auditors put the screws to a small business owner, they scrutinize the mileage documentation closely. You can’t just tell them the dog ate your homework. But the agency holds itself to a different standard because there is little accountability.
Even if taxpayers are able to navigate the minefield which accompanies filing a return, it may still be all for naught. Just this year, the IRS was caught purposefully destroying 30 million active taxpayer files and then didn’t bother to tell the affected filers.
The IRS having more data to comb through is dangerous. The IRS’ data security is questionable at best. Regardless of the countless hoops one has to jump through in order to submit their sensitive information, the IRS is still prone to exposing confidential personal data.
For example, the IRS had thousands of files leaked or stolen in 2021, including those of several thousand of America’s highest earners over a span of 15 years. As I write this in August of 2022 --15 months later -- we still have yet to hear anything on the resulting investigation into this major breach of Americans’ privacy, despite IRS chief Charles Rettig and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen having been repeatedly quizzed under oath about this issue.
The Schumer-Manchin bill will do a lot of damage to hard working Americans as the Democrats look to fund whatever unnecessary spending they can. Funneling more money into the inept, bloated, and corrupt IRS to harass small business owners and middle-class Americans is reckless.
Let’s hope Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema puts a stop to it.
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