The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to rescind more than $70 billion in funding to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on Monday, fulfilling newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s promise to prevent the hiring of 87,000 new agents to audit Americans.
In a 221-210 vote, the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act passed the House of Representatives. The bill was sponsored by GOP Reps. Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Michelle Steel of California.
“House Republicans just voted unanimously to repeal the Democrats’ army of 87,000 IRS agents. This was our very first act of the new Congress, because [the] government should work for you, not against you. Promises made. Promises kept,” McCarthy tweeted after the vote.
The bill would rescind all funds that would increase the IRS’ size by twofold and may be used to carry out further audits of Americans.
The Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act granted an $80 billion increase to the IRS over a 10-year period, with more than half of that money approved with the goal of aiding the agency’s efforts to combat tax evasion. The money would have been used to fund 87,000 new IRS posts.
“The last thing the American people need right now are more audits from an out-of-control, bloated IRS,” Smith said on Monday ahead of the vote. “The Inflation Act funding for IRS would lead to the hiring of 87,000 new IRS employees tasked with raising enough revenue to pay for Democrats’ Green New Deal priorities.”
“Our bill leaves in place funding for customer service and IT improvements because IRS is in desperate need of reform, but it protects middle-class families from audits they cannot afford,” he added.
This comes after a not-so-shocking report last week revealed that the IRS hassled low-income taxpayers the most in fiscal year 2022, despite the Biden administration’s promise that it would not increase audits for those making under $400,000 annually.
“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,” Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse wrote in its report, noting that the poorest taxpayers are “easy marks in an era when IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn’t have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions.”
