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Paul L. Caron
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Monday, April 25, 2016

The IRS Scandal, Day 1082

IRS Logo 2Linda Beale (Wayne State), Defending the IRS Against Right-Wing Attacks:

[T]he New York Times on Friday reported on the havoc that the right's attacks on the IRS's budget and its employees' morale has wrought. ...

As certain as death and taxes, tax season political attacks on the I.R.S. go back decades. But in recent years, the intensity has grown and the agency’s funding in turn shrank more than any other time in memory. The campaign gained strength in 2013, when Republicans seized on management failures to allege that I.R.S. employees had singled out conservative groups for greater scrutiny and delays in reviewing their applications for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” organizations, though liberal-leaning groups were examined as well, investigations showed. ...

Clearly, the IRS is a centrally important agency that cannot be eliminated.  We need to collect taxes, and we need an agency with the expertise to advise Congress about tax law and policy as well as to interpret the laws in a way that makes it possible to implement them.  (Congress has a tendency to leave anything really difficult to the IRS to figure out, by authorizing or ordering the Secretary of the Treasury to promulgate regulations carrying out the intent of specific provisions.)  We need to have sufficient IRS staffing to enforce the law through tough audits, especially of the wealthy and corporate enterprises.  We need to have sufficient funding to maintain updated technology--one of the problems with the cuts in funding to the IRS is that the computer systems are more easily hacked than they should be.  That fault lies with Congress, which expects managerial miracles from an agency with constant battering from the right-wing to try to demoralize its employees and constant resource cuts that make budget planning and regular maintenance of systems practically impossible.  When Congress adds additional functions to the agency (whether in the form of additional tax systems to oversee, such as the penalty provisions in the Affordable Care Act,  or additional tax expenditures operating as a subsidy to one or another of Congress's favored groups, such as the section 199 "manufacturing" deduction) but fails to add funding to cover the additional responsibility, it means that the IRS's ability to carry out its task well will be jeopardized, and service to taxpayers will decline. ...

The fact is, the IRS makes money when Congress gives it funding to ensure tax compliance:  as the article states (and many studies support), "the agency collects at least $4 for every $1 it spends for tax compliance."  Former IRS commissioners--during Republican and Democratic administrations--therefore joined together to urge Congress to undo the perverse results of underfunding the IRS.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/04/the-irs-scandal-day-1082.html

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Comments

The title of the article should be "Defending the IRS from Right-wing Counter-attacks."

Posted by: ruralcounsel | Apr 25, 2016 4:57:25 AM