Paul L. Caron
Dean





Friday, January 16, 2015

The IRS Scandal, Day 617

IRS Logo 2Headline & Global News, Ted Cruz Urges GOP-led Congress To Shut Down The IRS, Claims It Will Be 'The Single Most Important Tax Reform':

The new GOP-led Congress should wield its power to officially shut down the Internal Revenue System, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said on Monday.

At Heritage Action's 2015 conservative policy summit, Cruz claimed that Republicans should take advantage of their control of Congress to abolish the U.S. government tax agency, The Daily Caller reported.

"We need to pass fundamental tax reform making our tax code simpler, flatter, fairer," he said. "And I'll tell you, the single most important tax reform, we should abolish the IRS."

"The last two years have fundamentally changed the dynamics of this debate [on the tax code]," he continued. "As we have seen the weaponization of the IRS, as we have seen the Obama administration using the IRS in a partisan manner to punish its political enemies."

"In my view there is a powerful populist instinct to take the 110,000 employees at the IRS, to padlock the building, and to put all 110,000 of them down on our southern border."

Ex-IRS official Lois Learner, who headed the IRS division, has been accused of processing Tea Party and conservative groups' for tax exempt status in an unfair manner before the 2010 and 2012 elections, including the IRS who improperly delayed dozens of applications for years, according to an internal audit by the agency's inspector general. Documents show that some liberal groups were singled out, too, Politico reported.

Since the scandal broke in 2013, documents from various agencies and individuals have been requested by GOP-led House committees, with IRS claiming to have spent $10 million in compliance of such requests. But Lerner, who was placed on administrative leave shortly after the scandal broke, and has since retired, remained the focal suspicion of the controversy, repeatedly denying any illegal behavior.

Although Cruz acknowledged that it might not be entirely possible to eradicate the IRS or adopt a flat tax while Obama is in office, he said bold steps could be taken to reduce the power of Washington by simplifying the tax code and reducing the burden of American citizens, according to The Daily Caller.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/01/the-irs-scandal-9.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

What Jennifer said.

Posted by: Jane | Jan 16, 2015 10:54:45 AM

I don't know if many have said this recently, but I'd like to say thank you for documenting all of this day after day. It's pretty jarring to go back and read the beginnings, with the initial outrage, the subsequent indignation, and of course the denials. So, thank you for not letting this one go down the internet's memory hole.

Posted by: Jennifer Fitzpatrick | Jan 16, 2015 9:02:22 AM

It isn’t necessarily a bad idea to abolish the IRS. Except for the tens-of-thousands of years of experience and knowledge that would be lost by wholesale dismissal of its workers, there is no magic in the IRS. It is a silly and dangerous idea, however, to contend that a nation of 316 million people, stretching across a large continental land mass, with a GDP approaching $17 trillion, would be able to get by without a sophisticated and powerful revenue assessment and collection agency, call it what you will. Nor is it necessarily a bad idea to abolish the income tax in a post-industrial economy. Though I call myself a liberal, I think all sectors of our society would do better under some kind of an advanced-design consumption tax, whether a modified national sales tax or a VAT. But it is a silly and ignorant idea to think that such a tax could be assessed and collected by the states for the federal government. (Like, dude, where is THAT in the Constitution?) Do people actually pay money to listen to Sen. Cruz? With straight faces?

Posted by: Publius Novus | Jan 16, 2015 8:20:24 AM