WSJ: 63% Of IRS Audits Target Taxpayers Earnings Less Than $200,000, Not $400,000 Promised By President Biden

Wall Street Journal Editorial, IRS’s Most Wanted: The $200,000 Man:

The Internal Revenue Service got an audit of its own in time for Tax Day, and two irregularities jump out. President Biden’s plan to hire a new army of tax collectors is falling flat, and the agents already at work are targeting the middle class.

Those are two findings of the IRS’s watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta). The report examines IRS progress on mandates from the Biden Administration backed by tens of billions in new funding. The first supposed goal was to audit more ultrawealthy and fewer middle-class filers, but it’s not going so well.

By last December the IRS decided that it wouldn’t begin tracking its progress until later this year. That’s because the agency has been slow to shift its focus to high-income taxpayers, who make up a small share of total filings. Its April 2023 strategic plan pledged that future audits would disproportionately target individuals making at least $400,000, but “did not include specifics on how the IRS was going to ensure it met this commitment,” says Tigta.

The most recent data suggests the IRS is still focused on the middle class. As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000. Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million. Don’t forget to save those charitable-giving receipts.

Reason, Promise-Breaking IRS:

Liar, liar: Back in August 2022, when some of us were fresh-faced and naive, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assured us that their $80 billion infusion of cash (over the course of a decade, so they could hire some 87,000 new workers, including but not limited to men with guns) would actually be a means of targeting millionaire and billionaire scofflaws, not ordinary middle-class earners. ...

Vindicated: "The Internal Revenue Service got an audit of its own in time for Tax Day, and two irregularities jump out," reports The Wall Street Journal, having labored through the latest Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reports. "President Biden's plan to hire a new army of tax collectors is falling flat, and the agents already at work are targeting the middle class." ...

 The IRS had set a goal of hiring 3,700 new agents in the first year of boosted funding. Instead, in the first six months, they'd hired 34.