by Frank Holmes, reporter
Now that Congress has passed the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the IRS will audit more than 710,000 more middle-class Americans… and conservatives may be the first ones in their sights.
The bill, which is a watered-down version of the Green New Deal and some provisions of the “Build Back Better” act, will let the Biden administration hire approximately 87,000 more IRS employees — and the president admits that means more audits. He just won’t admit who’s getting audited.
The administration still insists that the IRS will focus on people making at least $400,000—but the federal government admits the vast majority of new audits will hit the poor and middle class…hundreds of thousands of them. And experts worry the Biden administration is weaponizing federal agencies to go after Republicans and conservatives, the same way they’ve raided President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago.
The Biden administration still throws up a smokescreen. IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has said that the “rate” of audits will stay the same as they have been over the last decade.
That’s exactly the problem.
The group that has “more grounds for concern than others” is “low-income households with less than $25,000 in annual earning,” reported CBS News. Americans in the lowest income bracket are “five times as likely to be audited by the IRS as everyone else, according to a new analysis of IRS data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.”
The IRS audits 13 out of every 1,000 tax returns filed by people who make less than $25,000—compared to less less than three tax returns filed by everybody else.
That’s the way things are now. But if the Biden administration hires tens of thousands more auditors, and maintains the same “rate” of audits, that will mean a torrent of new IRS audits.
The federal government has already broken down how it’s going to wring more money out of Americans—and they’re not really focusing on the rich.
The Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee just applied the numbers of 2012—which the Biden administration says it wants to bring back—and found the IRS would have 1.2 million new audits. A little over 94,000 audits would look at people making $500,000 a year or more.
The IRS will audit more than four times as many people who make less than $25,000—including 127,773 who have zero income. The largest number of audits will hit Americans with the lowest incomes: The IRS plans to audit people who earned between $1 and $24,999 at least 313,064 more times.
The IRS also has designs to audit 147,194 more Americans making between $25,000 and $50,000; and another 122,832 audits for people earning $50,000 to $74,999 a year.
Add it up, and the federal government admits the IRS plans to instigate 710,863 new audits of people who make less than $75,000 a year.
“Value shoppers at Walmart and other retailers, already struggling with higher prices and more expensive fuel to drive to the store, will get hit with 710,000 additional audits thanks to the Manchin-Biden Democrat bill,” says Rep. Kevin Brady, the highest-ranking Republican to sit on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees everything having to do with taxes.
“More than half of the assessed amounts are to come from Americans with reported income between zero and $50,000,” according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Between 61 percent and 78 percent of all new tax money will come from people who make nothing to $100,000. Only four to nine percent of new income will come from people making $500,000 or more. The report even includes a strange note that people who make half-a-million dollars a year or more will end up giving the IRS less money than people who make “less than $0.”
The Democrats don’t plan to soak the rich; they plan to screw the poor.
Biden officials are trying to laugh off these claims—but they only dig the hole deeper. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote, “I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels.”
If the letter only rules out using “additional resources” to audit middle-class taxpayers, that means the Biden administration could use every single dollar of existing funds to sicc IRS agents on Walmart shoppers.
“Americans can expect to be further crushed,” said Americans for Tax Reform, which leans to the Right.
That’s bad for business—especially when America is already in the middle of a recession. “Every retailer in the U.S. who cares about their hard-hit customers should be fighting to block this unnecessary harassment of hard-working Americans,” said Rep. Brady. At least a few businesses have listened. The National Federation of Independent Businesses—which represents small business owners, Mom-and-Pop stores around the country—said the bill amounts to an “indirect tax” on all Americans, which will hit the corner store way before it hurts the suits at Walmart, Amazon, or Google.
Democrats know exactly what they’re doing. Every single Senate Democrat voted against an amendment offered by Senator Mike Crapo (R-Ida.) that said not a single dollar “may be used to audit taxpayers with taxable incomes below $400,000.” The amendment, which would guarantee what the administration says it wants, went down on a party-line vote, 51-10, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the Senate tie.
Crapo decided to go one step further: He asked the Congressional Budget Office to score his amendment, and the CBO found that the IRS planned to audit and rake in at least $20 billion in new revenue from people making less than $400,000.
In other words, not only do congressional Democrats know they plan to squeeze the middle class; they know exactly how much money they’re going to shake down from us.
“The plan for a supercharged IRS is designed to squeeze as much money out of the American people as possible. And the vast majority of the impact will be felt by Americans making far less than $400,000 a year,” said the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. “If this bill passes, one of the new 87,000 IRS employees just may be knocking on your door very soon.”
There’s another group that should be looking over its shoulder: “Conservatives should be especially worried. Will the Biden administration weaponize these tens of thousands of new agents against them as it’s done at the Justice Department and the FBI?” asked two-time presidential candidate Steve Forbes and former Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore in the New York Post.
If this bill passes, it won’t reduce inflation, but it will increase heartburn, stress, and endless hours dealing with angry IRS agents.
And if you’re reading this, you may be in their crosshairs.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”