Democrats’ ‘Enhanced’ IRS Targeted Poor People: STUDY

A new report from a Syracuse University study group reemphasizes the likelihood that the 87,000 new IRS agents funded by congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden will harass low-income taxpayers the most.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a highly reputable research outlet, reports, to quote the headline of its Jan. 4 report, that the “IRS audits few millionaires but targeted many low-income families in FY 2022.” More specifically, according to the TRAC Syracuse 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.”

So much for the Democrats looking out for the little guy.

Indeed, the IRS’s audit system is set up in a way that makes it almost inevitable that low-income earners, not millionaires, get harmed the most by audits, sometimes losing money not because the IRS found them to be gaming the system but because they don’t have the resources to comply with the audit demands.

As National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins reported to Congress, low-income earners have what TRAC Syracuse summarized as “complex issues inherently involved with substantiating the anti-poverty earned income tax credit.” Thus, now directly quoting Collins, “The IRS correspondence audit process is structured to expend the least amount of resources to conduct the largest number of examinations — resulting in the lowest level of customer service to taxpayers having the greatest need for assistance.”