Dusty, you don’t even need to send a letter; just take a good, hard look at your own voting record and the Republican Party’s efforts to deny the IRS the funding it requires to process refunds, collect taxes, catch tax cheats, and assist taxpayers:
President Biden’s social spending bill, which is worth $1.75 trillion and could increase the government deficit by $367 billion over ten years, is opposed by Johnson’s staff, according to a statement released late on Thursday, Nov. 18, from Washington, D.C.
Johnson, a Republican, said in a statement that “this enormous spending package undermines employment, puts further on Medicare, and according to the CBO, isn’t paid for.” “I will not cast a vote.
Johnson also noted that the bill will spend $80 billion on IRS enforcement as well as extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act and Medicare, both of which he claimed is already in danger of “insolvency.”
Republicans in the Senate have threatened to derail a proposed crackdown on wealthy tax cheats by removing financing for IRS enforcement from a developing bipartisan infrastructure proposal in response to demands from wealthy conservative advocacy groups and contributors.
The repealed clause would have added $40 billion to the IRS budget over the next ten years to support the agency’s efforts to combat tax evasion, which has cost the federal government trillions of dollars in lost tax revenue in recent years.
According to studies done earlier this year by IRS researchers and academicians, the top 1 per cent is responsible for 36 per cent of the nation’s delinquent federal income taxes.
The IRS currently audits low-income Americans at a rate about equal to that of the wealthy, who frequently employ sophisticated tax avoidance schemes, as a result of ongoing funding shortfalls and inadequate manpower.
Large corporations are also abusing the IRS’s inadequate resources; the agency now only examines half of the tax returns of large corporations, allowing businesses to claim unauthorized tax breaks [Jake Johnson, “Republicans Renege on Deal with Democrats, Strip Funding for IRS in Gift to Rich Tax Cheats,” Salon.
Since 2010, significant funding reductions have been aimed at the IRS. After accounting for inflation, its current budget of $11.2 billion is a reduction of 18% from the level of 2010.
Since the IRS spends the majority of its funding on employment, the budget cuts have prompted the agency to drastically shrink its workforce.
Between 2010 and 2016, the IRS lost around 13,000 employees or about 14% of its total workforce.
The agency’s capacity to carry out its primary responsibilities of collecting taxes and enforcing the nation’s tax laws has been negatively impacted by these harmful changes.
According to seven former IRS commissioners from both Democratic and Republican administrations, “Over the last fifty years, none of us have ever witnessed anything like what has happened to the IRS appropriations over the last five years and the impact these appropriations reductions are having on our tax system.
Services provided to taxpayers, cybersecurity, and enforcement have all suffered from staff and other resource reductions.
Despite an uptick in 2016 after Congress somewhat increased funding for taxpayer services, taxpayer services have remained at poor levels throughout this period.
Even with this improvement, taxpayer callers had to wait over 18 minutes on average for an answer in the fiscal year 2016 and only 53% of their calls were answered.
Budget constraints have also prevented the IRS from making urgently needed updates to its IT infrastructure, jeopardizing the security of taxpayer data and impairing its capacity to locate and help victims of identity theft.
We’re lagging in terms of updating physical infrastructure and software, as IRS Commissioner John Koskinen noted.
We are exposed to more system failures and potential security breaches as a result, which threatens the stability and dependability of our information systems.
According to Chuck Marr, Emily Horton, and Brandon Debot of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Trump Budget Continues Multi-Year Assault on IRS Funding Despite Mnuchin’s Call for More Resources.”
It’s not good for the IRS. The agency has the smallest workforce it has had in decades and a historic backlog of unprocessed tax returns.
Since at least 2011, when it appeared that then-President Barack Obama intended to increase the IRS’s funding, House Republicans have been slashing the agency’s budget steadily. Democrats are upset because the cuts have continued since that time.
Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon and the current chair of the Senate Finance Committee, criticized Republicans on Thursday for the IRS’s understaffing and said that they are to blame for the millions of unprocessed tax returns this year.
Whether Wyden was responding to a fresh Republican legislative proposal about IRS funding is unknown.
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In a Senate floor speech, Wyden made a reference to a Netflix comedy sketch from “I Think You Should Leave” that has now gone viral online:
“Republicans are the man in the hot dog suit, swearing up and down that they are trying to locate the guy who did this.”
In the drawing, a hot dog-shaped car collides with a store, and a man dressed as a hot dog tries to divert the attention of the crowd and absolve himself of blame before fleeing as police try to catch him.
[Bove, Tristan Top Democrat Compares Republicans’ Complicity in Destroying the IRS to a Viral Netflix Comedy Sketch in Fortune article, “Republicans on IRS Funding Are ‘Like the Guy in the Hot Dog Suit’.”
The IRS’s slow processing of tax returns has Dusty fuming. The Republican Party and you, Dusty, defund the tax police, and that is what occurs.
