Those at the bottom of the food chain were easy targets for the government in 2022. This statement is backed up by statistics obtained from the IRS website. In the shocking revelation, it was discovered that low-income earners were the agency’s primary target aside from a few millionaires and billionaires.
“The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times virtually everyone else—were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit,” the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reported.
NEW: The IRS targeted low-income wage earners for audits vastly more than other American taxpayers in 2022. They were audited at a rate 5.5x higher than people in virtually every other tax bracket, per a new Syracuse University analysis.
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) January 7, 2023
This only proves that taxpayers with the lowest financial capacity are “easy targets in an era when the IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn’t have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions.”
The IRS is renowned for levying huge taxes on low-income earners, while only a few millionaires and billionaires are adequately audited and made to pay their appropriate taxes.
Syracuse University’s (TRAC) made available to the public data received from the Internal Revenue Service on all audits performed in the 2022 financial year. The reports revealed that the agency treaded its old path regardless of additional funding set aside for the IRS based on 2021’s Inflation Reduction Act.
In August 2022, the inflation reduction act that provided $80 billion in additional funding was passed. The purpose of the new funding is to ensure that over the next decade, the IRS can afford to employ the services of 87,000 new workers. This large workforce was purportedly to ensure that the millionaires and billionaires were void of tax evasion.
Naive journalists and the Biden administration claimed that the potentially large workforce of the IRS wouldn’t lead to a greater audit of people earning below $400,000 yearly. Supporters thought the improved workforce would make those at the top major targets. However, this doesn’t capture the workings of the IRS’ incentives and the efficiency of agency-wide reforms.
Rep. Kevin Mccarthy (R-CA), the newly elected House speaker, has promised to look into Biden’s administration’s employment of additional IRS agents. Kevin believes the government should help the poor and not go after them.
The U.S. Speaker-elect, who came into power after 15 rounds of voting, has vowed that the first bill under his tenure would be the invalidation of the 87,000 new IRS agents.
