A not-so-shocking report reveals that the Biden administration bullied some of the poorest taxpayers through the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
According to a recent report released by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the IRS hassled low-income taxpayers the most last year.
“Last year over 164 million individual income tax returns were filed. The IRS audited 626,204 returns, down from 659,003 during FY 2021. Less than 100,000 of these (93,595) were regular audits in contrast to correspondence audits (532,609). Together this means that last year the odds of audit had fallen to 3.8 out of every 1,000 returns filed (0.38%),” TRAC wrote in its report.
“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 … As we previously have reported, this group of taxpayers have historically been targeted not because they account for the most tax under-reporting, but because they 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.”
Meanwhile, relatively few millionaires and billionaires were caught up in the audit sweep, which used its budget from pre-existing sources and extra funding from the Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction Act.”
“While the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act provides the IRS with a large expansion of future funding to beef up audits of the rich, last year IRS revenue agents were only able to audit a small number of millionaire returns. Indeed, during FY 2022, the odds a millionaire was audited by an IRS revenue agent was just 1.1 percent,” the report continued.
“During FY 2022, years of budget cuts and increased needs in other sectors left the IRS with only around 1,400 staff-years of revenue agent time to apply to the 165 million income tax 1040 returns that were filed. Even though the IRS applied one-fourth of these hours to auditing millionaires, still barely over 1 out of every 100 millionaires were audited.”
The most recent TRAC data also reveals that the Uniparty’s claim that IRS funding was being used to look into the wealthiest Americans rather than normal Americans was a falsehood we were all subjected to. Rich or poor, the IRS shouldn’t be intimidating and harassing anyone.
