When President Joe Biden pleaded for Congress to increase the budget of the Internal Revenue Service by more than $80 billion he claimed that he would use that money to go after “the rich.” Well, he got his money. So did he fulfill his promise?
It turns out, “no” is the answer to that.
When he was angling for the huge expansion in IRS funding to hire nearly 87,000 new IRS agents, he claimed, without any foundation, that his new suite of agents would be put to use auditing “the rich” to squeeze more cash out of them. He claimed that he would only target people making more than $400,000 a year and would make rich people pay “their fair share,” as The Federalist reported.
The media was more than happy to play up Biden’s unfounded proclamations. Indeed, Bloomberg has continued to push Biden’s IRS propaganda to this day.
Only a month ago, the news outlet claimed that Biden’s bigger IRS budget is meant to “[build] up its enforcement efforts on wealthy individuals and companies that aren’t paying what they owe.”
Naturally, the IRS itself also played along with Biden’s con game, telling America that the budget hike would “restore fairness in tax compliance by shifting more attention onto high-income earners, partnerships, large corporations and promoters abusing the nation’s tax laws. The effort… will center on adding more attention on wealthy, partnerships and other high earners that have seen sharp drops in audit rates for these taxpayer segments during the past decade.”
Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, also assured the nation that no one making less than $400,000 a year had to worry that the IRS was coming for them with an audit, at least not in any greater numbers than have occurred in the past.
Yellen insisted that “contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation,” and that “small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.”
So, as Biden sought his monstrous bump in the IRS budget, he told us all that only “the rich” need to worry.
Are you worried about the IRS targeting you?
That was then. Now, a new review of just what the IRS has done with its bigger budget and thousands of new IRS agents shows something quite different.
The new audit of the IRS finds that a whopping 63 percent of new IRS audits were aimed at middle-income families, those who made less than $200,000 a year.
“Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board reported last week.
The report, assembled by the IRS’s watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, “examines IRS progress on mandates from the Biden Administration backed by tens of billions in new funding,” the Journal added.
In fact, Biden’s claim that he was only going to target those making more than $400,000 isn’t even a policy at the IRS. As the Journal noted, there has never been any guidelines put in place to focus on that tax bracket and the agency has made no plans to do so.
The Federalist also noted that a 2022 report from Syracuse University found that the lower income earners suffer an audit rate that is five times higher than those who make more.
Some Republicans have continued to work to put a dent in Biden’s intention of growing the size, scope and reach of the IRS. Last year, Indiana Republican Sen. Mike Braun re-introduced the “Don’t Weaponize the IRS Act” to prevent the taxing agency from using its power the threaten audits as weapons to attack conservative-leaning groups.
In 2022, Republicans tried to add an amendment to Biden’s budget bill to “prevent the use of additional Internal Revenue Service Funds from being used for audits of taxpayers with taxable incomes below $400,000.” Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats torpedoed it.
And since taking back control of the House, Republicans have succeeded in clawing back at least $20 billion of Biden’s new IRS funding, the Washington Post reported in January. They are also attempting to short the IRS of even more of that Biden spike.
Regardless, at least so far, Biden’s claim that he only intended to target “the rich” for higher rates of audits is simply a lie. To date, the IRS has made no effort to stop targeting the middle classes and to instead go after the top earners. And by the looks of their processes and policies, they have no plans to do so.
