(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – The Internal Revenue Service has outlined a plan to use the $80 billion in extra funding the Democrats approved last year to include deploying 30,000 new staffers in the next two years.
The hiring of tens of thousands of extra employees and the introduction of new technologies to boost “tax enforcement and customer service,” the tax authority said on Thursday in its new Strategic Operating Plan, Reuters reported, as cited by Newsmax.
Last year, the Democrat majorities in both chambers of the US Congress adopted the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated an additional $80 billion in funding for the IRS over the next ten years.
The measure was blasted by Republican critics who have insisted that it would boost the tax authority’s ability to monitor and “harass” middle-class and working-class Americans.
According to the Reuters report, however, the new IRS funding “aims to help close the “tax gap” between taxes owed and those paid, estimated by Treasury at some $600 billion a year, by focusing new audits on the wealthiest Americans.”
The extra money would allow the tax agency to “rebuild” its “audit capabilities and 1960s-era computer technology after a decade of funding cuts mostly by Republican-controlled Congresses,” the report adds.
An estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office project that the $80 billion in new IRS funding will help the agency generate $204 billion in new revenue for the US government over the next decade. The Treasury Department has projected the extra income at $400 billion.
The tax authority’s newly published Strategic Operating Plan revealed it would absorb $8.64 billion of the new funding in the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years.
It also showed that 8,782 of the nearly 30,000 new hires during those years will be “enforcement staff.”
The National Taxpayer Advocate of the IRS, Erin Collins, has written a blog post stating the financial boost for the agency was a “game changer” for its efficiency. Yet, she still urged Congress to reallocate more money to taxpayer services to “encourage compliance.”
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans, who now have a majority in the House, have been trying to repeal the extra IRS funding, demanding budget cuts in exchange for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling.
According to Reuters, “some conservatives in the party continue to claim that the agency is hiring an ‘army’ of 87,000 armed agents to harass Americans on their taxes.”
The report argues that the IRS has stated its average taxpayer’s audit rates would not increase after the new funding injection.
Danny Werfel, the new IRS Commissioner, told reporters the tax authority would make public its hiring and spending plans for the 2025 fiscal year.
He added the share of the agency’s criminal investigation staff would remain at its present level of 3% of the total IRS workforce.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service plans to hire nearly 30,000 new employees and deploy new technology over the next two years as it ramps up an $80 billion investment plan to improve tax enforcement and customer service, it said Thursday. https://t.co/g9ppXUAu97
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) April 6, 2023
