Democrats are repeating misleading claims that a supercharged IRS with 87,000 new agents will not target lower- and middle-income earners.
However, the IRS has a longstanding pattern of targeting households making under $75,000 a year. This assault will continue – and rise to even higher levels – under Democrats’ plan. Democrats voted against Republican amendments that would have protected Americans making less than $400,000 from more audits because that’s exactly who they always intended to target.
Most Americans should prepare for an increased chance of being audited by the IRS, Karl Rove writes in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
KEY EXCERPTS:
Democrats are supercharging the IRS, despite a long history of targeting lower- and middle-income earners.
- “Add it up, and more than 95 percent of all audits of individual returns have historically been of households with less than $200,000 in income and more than 75 percent of those with less than $75,000 income.
- “Less than 5 percent have been performed on returns of those with $200,000 or more in income.
- “…It’s obvious from these data that the bulk of the new audits funded by the Inflation Reduction Act are going to hit households making less than $200,000 a year.
- “If the IRS honors its promise to hold the share of audits to historical levels, that’ll be 95 percent of the new audits.”
Analysis from Ways and Means Republican predicts Americans making less than $75,000 will see 710,000 more audits each year.
- “The IRS won’t predict what taxpayers are in store for. The Congressional Budget Office won’t estimate, though it did say that the number of audits will ‘rise for all taxpayers’ to levels the IRS had in 2010, when a greater percentage of returns were audited.
- “Drawing on that year’s data, a Republican House Ways and Means Committee staff analysis predicts that there will be an additional 1.2 million audits a year over the coming decade, of which 710,000 each year will hit those making less than $75,000.”
Democrats voted against guardrails that would have protected lower- and middle-income taxpayers from more audits.
- “Congressional Democrats even had an opportunity to protect Americans making less than $400,000 from these audits and chose not to.
- “Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) proposed an amendment to the Inflation Reduction Act to prohibit the use of any new IRS compliance funds for audits of companies or individuals with incomes below $400,000.
- “All 50 Democratic senators voted ‘no’ on Aug. 7, killing the amendment.”