An internal watchdog for the Department of Treasury is slated to audit the Internal Revenue Service in order to make sure that its own agents and staff are paying their taxes.
The audit was first kicked off at the behest of Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) in the wake of a Democrat plan for roughly 87,000 new employees at the tex enforcement agency. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration previously discovered that a few hundred employees of the IRS may have outright failed to pay their own taxes, with some offering excuses to the tune of claiming to not know how. Some of these were even re-hired for a second term at the agency in the wake of being terminated for “willful failure to properly file their Federal tax returns.”
“Ironically, hundreds of employees at the IRS itself may have willfully failed to pay their taxes. More than 300 of these were repeat offenders, yet the tax agency did little to discipline the tax offenders on its payroll,” claimed Ernst in a comment issued Wednesday. “Before Biden’s army of auditors starts harassing innocent taxpayers, let’s first make sure the tax collectors have paid their own taxes.”
Ernst stated in a letter to Inspector General J. Russell George this past summer issuing the vote that his office found in 2019 that 1,250 IRS employees had failed to pay their tax bills on time or even in full, including multiple hundred of whom were knowingly and willfully delinquent or repeat offenders, and that the tax collecting group had “done little to discipline these tax cheats on its own payroll.”
As Old Uncle Joe, along with the rest of the Democrats, has been trying to shove through legislation to almost double the size of the IRS workforce, conservatives and even the entirely nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office seem to want far more aggressive audits of middle-class taxpayers.
“Innocent, hardworking Americans should not be subjected to unfair and costly IRS audits when the agency is ignoring tax cheats on its own payroll,” expressed Ernst.
The inspector general responded to her request, it would audit the department to discover just how many employees are not “fully compliant on their Federal tax obligations” and the total number of current workers who were brought back to work in the wake of being terminated or retiring due to their performance issues, up to and including failure to fully pay their taxes.
The plan to drastically increase the number of agents within the Internal Revenue Service was put forth in a section of the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, whose recent passage was celebrated this past Tuesday by Old Uncle Joe. The Biden admin stated that these new auditors would only focus on companies and the wealthy, but Ernst remained quite skeptical.
“The chances [of that] are very slim,” stated Ernst. “Eighty-seven thousand agents and Joe Biden said no one making under $400,000 would be audited, but we know that’s not true. They will go after the low-hanging fruit, and that’s hard-working Americans.”
