Becoming toothless

I’ve been enjoying the wonders of livestreaming this evening. A nephew and several grand nieces and nephews of the large Texas part of my family participate in a choir program in their town. The program has choirs for kids 4 years old to high school and family was in most of the choirs.

I could identify the family members in the select choir, the high school choir, and I think I identified the ones in the middle school choir. But I couldn’t tell which of the little cherubs in the upper and lower elementary choirs were related to me. I hope they send Christmas cards with family photos. Or I need to visit Texas again soon.



Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica wrote a big article about the gutting of the IRS.

Congress may allocate dollars for this or that government program, but the Internal Revenue Service actually puts those dollars into the federal treasury so those programs have real dollars to use. The IRS gets that money by collecting taxes – designing the forms, helping citizens fill them out, matching forms from workers with forms from employers, processing those forms, receiving withholding dollars from employers and workers, verifying that what we put on those forms makes sense, and then receiving our payments or issuing refunds.

The IRS also gets money through enforcement – the dreaded IRS audit. They look for people underpaying or not paying taxes and go after them so that they do. This can bring in billions.

But Congress has been steadily slashing the IRS budget. The enforcement team needs workers and equipment to do that enforcing. The team that processes the forms needs workers. And Congress is making sure they don’t have enough workers.

This would have been big news if there were streams of workers coming from IRS offices holding layoff notices. But the process has been slow enough – one departure at a time over eight years – that we haven’t noticed.

The number of IRS auditors is down a third from 2010. Nearly a third of the rest are eligible to retire in the next year, and with current conditions, many of them will. The number of audits is down 42% since 2010. Even though they conduct fewer audits the remaining auditors are stretched thin. They limit how much investigation they do in each case to be able to get on to the next.

Investigations of those who don’t file a tax return have plummeted. As has investigation of those who file but don’t pay. Tax obligations expire in 10 years and the amount of expired tax in 2017 is $8.3 billion. That number will surely rise over the years.

And the ability to investigate criminals is also down. And here we get to why. The biggest beneficiaries of a gutted IRS are corporations and the wealthy (we’re not surprised). It takes specialized auditors to unravel tax avoidance schemes or even simply audit a billion-dollar company. And those auditors are leaving. The chance of being caught doing something wrong has greatly diminished. The IRS is much less feared.

So the IRS is going easy on the rich, not able to keep up with the ways they avoid taxes. But audits haven’t dropped off for one group of people – the poor. In particular the poor who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit. They’re 20 times more likely to be audited than the rich. Yeah, that’s messed up logic. And evidence of class warfare the rich are waging against the poor (while they accuse the poor of waging against the rich).

Of course, the big danger is that the general public will realize the IRS has become toothless. Tax cheating would explode and the federal deficit will balloon by a trillion dollars.

“Abolish the IRS” has been a GOP talking point since Newt Gingrich became Speaker in 1994. They depicted an agency that had run amok with biased examiners and agents in flak jackets storming a business. The agency recovered from that false black eye by 2010. But the IRS became a GOP target again because the Affordable Care Act is also a tax act, requiring the IRS to verify if a person has health insurance, among other things. The attacks weren’t any more truthful, but still effective, at least in providing a rationale for further budget cuts.

Congress made a big cut in December of 2014, just before the tax season. The biggest hit was in hiring temporary people to answer phones. That brought such a complaint from the public that the next year funding was restored for “taxpayer services” while cutting the enforcement budget again. There haven’t been cuts since. There was even an increase for 2018 – but only to implement the tax scam bill.

I’m a strong believer in an equitable and balanced tax system. When government is acting like it should I get benefit from my tax dollars – good roads, clean air and water, safe food, safe cities, beautiful parks, a healthy and educated populace, opportunity for all, a presence for peace in the international arena, someone to side with the little guys against the big ones, someone to stand against racism, someone to champion justice, and on and on. When this works as it should in a functioning democracy it is worth what I’m paying in taxes.

But that’s not what we have now. We have a government that is malicious to the little guy to give benefits to the big guy, someone who encourages racism, someone who doesn’t care about our health, education, or safety, someone who stirs up international conflict, wants to exploit our parks, and generally turn the government into a way to enrich themselves and their cronies.

And I’m required to financially support that?