Today is tax day, the dubious “holiday” most Americans love to hate.
But as millions of Americans scramble to file their tax returns by today’s deadline, a top Republican lawmaker just uncovered a massive amount of taxpayers’ waste happening right under the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) nose.
GOP Sen. Joni Ernst, R-I.A., introduced new legislation requiring the IRS to police itself and ensure that all its workers are fully caught-up on their tax debts.
Ernst formally introduced the Audit the IRS Act, which requires the tax-collecting agency to probe its workers annually and fire every agent who doesn’t pay their tax bills.
The measure comes in response to a July 2024 watchdog report’s findings that current and former workers owed $46 million worth of taxes and that about 5% of IRS employees and contractors weren’t paying their personal tax obligations.
“I am squashing the 1776-style tax revolt at the IRS and forcing bureaucrats to play by the rules they are enforcing on the American people,” Ernst told reporters about her bill.
“We must conduct a full accounting of America’s tax agency by auditing the auditors. Every single tax-dodging tax collector needs to be shown the door.”
Four months after the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s (TIGTA) July report on IRS workers skirting their tax bills, the IRS informed Ernst that it still had 2,044 employees on staff who owed some $12 million in taxes.
According to a report from the Iowan from Ernst’s home state, just 20 of the 70 IRS agents who were found to have “willfully” skipped out on their taxes were fired.
Under the Audit the IRS Act, workers with “seriously delinquent tax debt,” meaning individuals with a lien filed in public records against them, can’t continue serving at the agency.
Additionally, the bill would restrict the IRS from hiring workers with outstanding tax obligations.
The IRS has long struggled with unpaid taxes. Back in 2022, for instance, the agency estimated that the gap between total taxes owed and what was paid on time was about $696 billion.
That’s just shy of 40% of the US federal deficit for fiscal year 2024, which clocked in at about $1.8 trillion.
Ernst leads the Senate Department of Government Efficiency Caucus, which helps collaborate with the Trump administration’s federal cost-cutting initiatives.
Last month Ernst penned a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging him to crack down on IRS workers who don’t pay their taxes.
She also urged him to address the IRS’s outdated internal systems for tax collection and pointed to the bipartisan SAMOSA Act that cleared the House last year as a model.
Backers of the SAMOSA Act estimate it could save taxpayers $750 million annually, according to the New York Post.
About a quarter of IRS software, a third of agency programs, and 10% of its hardware are run on legacy systems, according to a 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office