Despite boasts about going after the 1%, they haven’t been the federal tax agency’s focus for some reason.
It has become a tiresome, platform talking point over the past few election cycles – The rich don’t pay enough tax. The accusation that corporations have paid zero income taxes has led to them being accused. The empty claim from Bernie Sanders was always “Millionaires and Billionaires” needed to pay their fair share. (He quickly dispatched ‘millionaires’ from his cliche’ the day his personal wealth was revealed to place him in that particular bracket.) Elizabeth Warren was harping on Elon Musk recently, making the vapid claim that they don’t pay taxes. He has since responded, and exposed her as an economic fool.
But now, some data has been uncovered to show that–for all the billowing smoke pouring forth from these cement-head politicians–they are not achieving their dream of generating more tax-and-spend revenue from these supposed wealthy scofflaws. IRS is their favorite enforcement arm, but instead of pursuing corpulent feline business owners, it has been going after those with little cash.
They manage the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at the University of Syracuse. This is a data center that compiles and analyzes information.Complete information regarding the spending, staffing and enforcement activities of federal government. TRAC just released an analysis of IRS activities and discovered that the IRS has audited the lowest income citizens far more often than any other agency.
According to TRAC, there was “[a]Significant increase in federal income tax audits focusing on the lowest-wage earners” in fiscal year 2021. In fiscal year 2021. This is an extraordinary story, which can only be told by a federal agency. Hoovering tax dollars was a federal agency that paid disproportionate attention to the most difficult to collect funds.
Our government at…well, something besides work.
IRS was unable to find funds to collect from people with the most wealth. At a rate 5/1, they audited those who were the most vulnerable in this country. pic.twitter.com/ZbT3hSCG6w
— Brad Slager – Digging into the CPAC 12-pack (@MartiniShark) March 12, 2022
TRAC research shows that there’s a clear reason. We see a mixture of looking-busy and meeting quotas as the causes of manpower shortage. It is labor-intensive and time-consuming to go through the vast records of wealthy filers. It would certainly be more lucrative for tax agents but this could also affect the number of audits that are being conducted.
As a result, you get a “correspondence audit”–a letter dashed off to a citizen who claims to be tax-exempt due to their income level, asking for verification–being registered in the system as an audit.
IRS accomplished over 650 thousand audits last year by jacking up its already high reliance on so called “correspondence audits” – essentially a letter from the IRS asking for documentation on a specific line item on a return. These letters were used to conduct only 100,000 out of 659,000 audits. Correspondence audits during FY 2021 rose to 85% of all IRS tax audits — up from roughly 80 percent during the previous two years
This is what it means. As an agency collecting tax revenue, it wasn’t as concerned with finding wealthy filers than with achieving a set number of records audits. This agency cared more about dollar amounts than quota figures. Insanity is evident in all other aspects of our country.
These audits were issued by the IRS at a time when the agency showed inability to address the needs and wants of its recipients. While the volume of taxpayer assistance increased, it appeared that IRS’ customer service was shrinking. A report was submitted to CongressIn 2021, there will be a significant increase in the number of phone calls to the agency TrippledThis is due to the flood of mail correspondence. However, only 11% of these calls reached someone at customer service.
Consider this: If your headache isn’t from head shaking, you might get a migraine. This combination of federal incompetence and a slowed collection system is combined with the huge amount of spending that Joe Biden has enacted at the time. At this point, taxing our patience seems to be the best way out.
About Post Author
