IRS watchdog rips into Biden’s false pledge that $80B would not be used to audit average Americans

A new report has been issued by the official watchdog of the Internal Revenue Service unsurprisingly admitting that the $80 billion given to the IRS by the Biden administration potentially means more audits for average Americans.

The watchdog claims the audits will occur if the IRS doesn’t take immediate action to prevent it and there is little indication they are inclined to do so.

“Last year, the Inflation Reduction Act — which was not actually designed to reduce inflation — gave the IRS $80 billion in new funding. That funding would be used to hire 87,000 new agents over the next decade and to increase tax enforcement,” TheBlaze reported.

“In response to criticism from Americans of all political views, the Biden administration promised that none of the money would be used to increase the number of audits on American households or small businesses earning less than $400,000 per year,” the media outlet continued.

That is apparently turning out to be yet another fib told by the Biden administration.

The official IRS watchdog, the US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), is claiming the IRS can’t fulfill its promise. TIGTA asserts that this is because the IRS defines high-income taxpayers as those earning in excess of $200,000 a year.

“There is no way to identify the complete population of taxpayers that meet the criterion of $400,000 or more specified by the current Treasury Secretary,” the report contends.

“The $200,000 threshold for high-income earners was set in 1976. When adjusted for inflation, that threshold would be more than $1 million today. Because of this issue, the TIGTA recommended the IRS establish a definition of high-income taxpayers in compliance with its promise. But the agency refused and cited concerns of ‘agility,'” TheBlaze reported.

“The IRS disagreed with this recommendation. It asserted that a static and overly proscriptive definition of high-income taxpayers for purposes of focusing on income levels above which taxpayers have unique and varied opportunities for tax would serve to deprive the IRS of the agility to address emerging issues and trends,” the report stated.

From the beginning, the Biden administration has claimed that the reason for billions of dollars to hire an army of new IRS agents was to increase tax enforcement against wealthy Americans who game the tax code for their benefit.

The TIGTA also noted that increasing enforcement when it comes to wealthy Americans will be problematic because the agency just doesn’t have enough agents who know how to tear into the financial data.

According to the watchdog, audits of high-income taxpayers have not increased.

“Our analysis disclosed no significant increase in the number of high-income individual return audits,” the report asserted.

“[D]espite congressional encouragement to examine individual high earners and the former Treasury Secretary’s directive, most examinations were not focused on high-income taxpayers,” the inspector general noted, making it evident that average Americans are being the ones targeted by the IRS.

“[W]e see no direct effort to increase examinations of individual high earners,” the report concluded.

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