Tax filers in 2022 will face the same frustrations and delays that have characterized tax season for years now, heightened by the pandemic. Treasury officials recently spoke to reporters in a conference to begin the process of lowering taxpayers’ expectations.
The IRS, they told reporters, is dealing with the pandemic and the fact that it has just 15,000 employees tasked with customer services, expected to handle more than 240 million calls. That’s about 16,000 calls per employee. The workforce at the IRS in 2022 is about the same size as it was in 1970. The population of the country has grown by about 60% since 1970. Officials also said that fewer auditors are working in the IRS now than at any point since World War II—when there were something like 200 million fewer people in the U.S.
Republicans have forced budget cuts on the agency for years, with Democratic help, that have resulted in a 25% cut in the workforce at the IRS. “By definition, no matter how much more efficient you are, you can’t lose 25 percent of the workforce and assume you can do the same volume of work. It’s a problem across the board—information technology; revenue agents; people answering the phones,” John Koskinen, who served as commissioner of the IRS under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, told reporters.
This is why enforcement has been so lopsided—the IRS has been going after regular people with audits because they’re so much easier. The millionaires and billionaires and corporations who commit fraud can afford to hire accounts and lawyers and fight audits, and the IRS simply doesn’t have capacity to fight that.
Decades of budget cuts have left the agency with ancient computer systems and far too few staff members. The House Budget Committee acknowledged these problems with the IRS in a report in 2020. “The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has faced harsh budget cuts over the last decade, hindering its ability to serve the American people in fundamental ways,” the committee said. “Even before the pandemic, the underfunded IRS struggled to carry out its core functions of tax collection and enforcement.”
That means a lot of tax cheats—the big ones who could owe hundreds of thousands or even millions—have been getting away with it. “According to a recent report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), due to a lack of resources, the IRS failed to audit more than 897,000 wealthy individuals who skipped out on filing tax returns over three years—and these individuals owed nearly $46 billion in taxes,” the committee reported. This comes after decades of Republicans vilifying, attacking, and starving the agency.
The Build Back Better legislation would help fix this. It still includes $44 billion to build the IRS’s enforcement capabilities back. The Biden administration estimates that would add $400 billion to the Treasury in unpaid taxes.“The framework will create a fairer tax system through transformation investments in the IRS: hiring enforcement agents who are trained to pursue wealthy evaders, modernizing outdated IRS technology, and investing in taxpayer service, so regular Americans can get their questions answered and access to the credits and benefits they are entitled to,” the White House said.
Democrat Joe Manchin doesn’t want that to happen. Hmm, I wonder why.
The IRS, they told reporters, is dealing with the pandemic and the fact that it has just 15,000 employees tasked with customer services, expected to handle more than 240 million calls. That’s about 16,000 calls per employee. The workforce at the IRS in 2022 is about the same size as it was in 1970. The population of the country has grown by about 60% since 1970. Officials also said that fewer auditors are working in the IRS now than at any point since World War II—when there were something like 200 million fewer people in the U.S.
Republicans have forced budget cuts on the agency for years, with Democratic help, that have resulted in a 25% cut in the workforce at the IRS. “By definition, no matter how much more efficient you are, you can’t lose 25 percent of the workforce and assume you can do the same volume of work. It’s a problem across the board—information technology; revenue agents; people answering the phones,” John Koskinen, who served as commissioner of the IRS under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, told reporters.
This is why enforcement has been so lopsided—the IRS has been going after regular people with audits because they’re so much easier. The millionaires and billionaires and corporations who commit fraud can afford to hire accounts and lawyers and fight audits, and the IRS simply doesn’t have capacity to fight that.
Decades of budget cuts have left the agency with ancient computer systems and far too few staff members. The House Budget Committee acknowledged these problems with the IRS in a report in 2020. “The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has faced harsh budget cuts over the last decade, hindering its ability to serve the American people in fundamental ways,” the committee said. “Even before the pandemic, the underfunded IRS struggled to carry out its core functions of tax collection and enforcement.”
That means a lot of tax cheats—the big ones who could owe hundreds of thousands or even millions—have been getting away with it. “According to a recent report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), due to a lack of resources, the IRS failed to audit more than 897,000 wealthy individuals who skipped out on filing tax returns over three years—and these individuals owed nearly $46 billion in taxes,” the committee reported. This comes after decades of Republicans vilifying, attacking, and starving the agency.
The Build Back Better legislation would help fix this. It still includes $44 billion to build the IRS’s enforcement capabilities back. The Biden administration estimates that would add $400 billion to the Treasury in unpaid taxes.“The framework will create a fairer tax system through transformation investments in the IRS: hiring enforcement agents who are trained to pursue wealthy evaders, modernizing outdated IRS technology, and investing in taxpayer service, so regular Americans can get their questions answered and access to the credits and benefits they are entitled to,” the White House said.
Democrat Joe Manchin doesn’t want that to happen. Hmm, I wonder why.