A federal inspector general has announced an audit of IRS employees to determine how many of them are cheating on their own taxes.
The audit was initiated at the request of Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) following the Democrat plan to hire 87,000 new IRS agents. Hundreds of IRS employees may not have paid their own taxes, according to previous findings by the Treasury Inspector General. Some of the employees cited reasons such as not knowing how to file their taxes. Among those employees, some were fired for “willful failure to properly file their income tax returns” only to be rehired later by the agency.
From the Daily Wire:
“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,” Ernst stated on 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 wrote to Inspector General J. Russell George this summer voting that his office found in 2019 that 1,250 IRS employees had not paid their tax bills in full or on time, including hundreds of whom were willfully delinquent or repeat offenders, and that the tax collecting agency had “done little to discipline these tax cheats on its own payroll.”
With Democrats and President Biden ramming through legislation to double the size of the IRS workforce, conservatives and even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects 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,” Ernst wrote.
The IG responded that at her request, it would audit the department to find out how many employees are not “fully compliant on their Federal tax obligations” and the number of current workers who were brought back after being fired or retiring following performance issues, including failure to fully pay their taxes.
The plan to dramatically expand the Internal Revenue Service was part of Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, whose recent passage Biden celebrated Tuesday. The Biden administration said new auditors would focus on the wealthy and corporations, but Ernst told The Daily Wire she is skeptical.
“The chances [of that] are very slim,” Ernst said. “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.”
The 2019 IG report said that IRS agents are required to be removed from their jobs for “willfully” failing to file or understating their taxes. But following a bureaucratic process filled with union protections, out of 1,250 cases in 2017, the IRS found that only 90 were “willful,” meaning the IRS agents “should have known” how to file their taxes properly.
