Posted on 06/13/2021 5:31:54 AM PDT by RandFan
The IRS is back in Republicans’ crosshairs following a ProPublica report based on the confidential tax records of the wealthiest Americans.
Republicans have long disliked the tax-collection agency, and have been critical of President Biden’s proposal to give the IRS significantly more resources. Now, GOP lawmakers are amplifying their attacks on the IRS in light of an unauthorized disclosure of tax data to ProPublica, arguing that it undermines taxpayers’ ability to have confidence in the agency.
“This is an astonishing breach of trust that should make taxpayers very concerned,” Rep. Kevin Brady (Texas), the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, told reporters Friday.
He said he expects to bring up the disclosure this coming week with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is scheduled to testify at an annual hearing on the president's budget.
ProPublica published a report Tuesday detailing how prominent U.S. billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in certain years have paid little-to-no federal income taxes. The article also found that the richest Americans paid little in taxes when compared to their wealth gains.
It is unclear who provided the tax information to ProPublica or how it was obtained.
“We do not know the identity of our source. We did not solicit the information they sent us,” ProPublica wrote. “The source says they were motivated by our previous coverage of issues surrounding the IRS and tax enforcement, but we do not know for certain that is true. We have considered the possibility that information we have received could have come from a state actor hostile to American interests.”
It is illegal for federal employees to make unauthorized disclosures of tax-return information. Administration officials said the matter has been referred to several agencies, including the inspectors general for the Treasury Department, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised concerns about the nature of the disclosure, Republicans in particular have been hammering the issue.
Prior to the ProPublica report, Republicans had been criticizing proposals in Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Families Plan to increase compliance with tax laws by providing the IRS with an additional $80 billion over a decade and to increase the amount of information that financial institutions report to the agency about account activity. Republicans are using the ProPublica article to step up their criticisms of those proposals.
"This most recent publication of taxpayer data is especially concerning in light of the Administration’s proposal to provide the IRS with a massive amount of unprecedented mandatory funding aimed partly at mandating collection of additional private and personal information from everyday Americans through financial institutions, including detailed information about their checking and savings accounts," Senate Finance Committee Republicans said in a letter Friday to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).
Conservatives predicted that the disclosure of the tax documents would doom Biden’s IRS enforcement proposal.
“I think this kills the effort,” said Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist.
Brady said the disclosure to ProPublica has “close to dealt a death blow” to the White White House’s plans.
Republicans said that the recent disclosure of wealthy Americans' tax records is not the first time that there has been an unauthorized disclosure of tax information.
GOP lawmakers also speculated about the motivations behind the disclosure, given that the article comes as Democrats are pushing to increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations to pay for Biden’s infrastructure proposals. Republicans generally are opposed to Democrats’ proposals to raise taxes on the rich and corporations.
“It looks political at this time when this information is being used even today to advance the Democrats’ narrative that the wealthy individuals don’t pay enough of their taxes,” Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.) said at a Ways and Means Committee hearing on Thursday.
It’s not new for Republicans to criticize the IRS, particularly when a Democrat is in the White House.
The agency was a major target of conservatives during the Obama administration following a 2013 report from TIGTA that found the agency had subjected Tea Party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status to extra scrutiny.
A subsequent report in 2017 from the inspector general found that there were also left-leaning groups subjected to extra scrutiny.
Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said the Tea Party controversy of the Obama era is still on the minds of many GOP voters, and that attacking the IRS in the wake of the ProPublica report makes sense politically for Republicans.
“If the goal is to fire up the base before 2022, certainly just uttering the letters I-R-S will do that,” he said.
Many working-class Republicans are no fans of the rich, but “they do believe it’s only a matter of time before the taxman cometh for them,” O’Connell said.
Democrats have also expressed concerns about the disclosure of tax information, and are supportive of investigations. But they have also sought to put a focus on the contents of the ProPublica article, arguing that its findings highlight the need to raise taxes on the rich.
Administration officials have defended the White House proposal to increase the amount of information banks report to the IRS, saying it would help collect more of the taxes already owed.
Mark Mazur, deputy assistant secretary for tax policy at Treasury, said at Thursday’s Ways and Means hearing that the proposal would help the IRS better focus on “situations of gross noncompliance that deserve some attention.”
Democrats also pushed back on GOP suggestions that there was a politically motivated leak of tax data.
“This fits a pattern of trying to stoke distrust of the IRS and limit its ability to fully and fairly administer the tax laws,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said in a statement.
“It is disheartening that such unsubstantiated accusations are being made at a time when we are seeking to provide the IRS with funding and staffing to address noncompliance by the wealthiest taxpayers.”
when the IRS went after conservative
the fn GOP did nothing year after year.
when THEY were exposed, it is a different thing.
the GOP is as evil as the DNC. EVIL. Jobberists. Traitors.
You are so right!
Republicans are missing the boat on a MAJOR issue that is a stone cold WINNER with the American people!
One way to preserve our FRee Republic is to replace the Marxist inspired progressive income tax with the FAIRtax!
AND, ABOLISH THE HIGHLY POLITICIZED IRS!
Find out how YOU can help us do that by going to https://www.bigsolution.org!
Only people who don’t pay taxes, like the IRS.
That includes all people who only pretend to pay taxes, like schoolteachers.
The person who leaked this confidential information should be publicly identified, terminated for cause, and banned for life in government service!
Biden’s plan would hire just under 87,000 IRS agents
My wife and daughter are both teachers. Good lesson plans don’t “just happen.” They work long hours, including during the summer, to prepare to teach their students. Grading and providing good feedback take a lot of time. Their students text message them on non-work hours with questions and they are happy to answer and help. They also pay their taxes like everybody else.
Ha! ‘Republicans’ wake up and smell the coffee, when the issues get TOO close to home!
On every other issue....zzzzzzzz
Kabuki. The GOP-e loves the IRS, as long as they’re controlling it.
IRS’s main responsibility is to funnel 1040 taxes to the Private Corporation FED.
The Private Corporation FED’s main responsibility is to pay the interest on the debt with the money from the IRS to the corporation’s owners (a half dozen Bankster families) and FED stockholders.
Other main responsibility is to loan the Federal Government money for all its programs and operations.
That’s basically it for the IRS and the Private Corporation FED. [see Grace Report]
The Private Corporation FED also pay’s [off] IRS employees.
Furthermore, a system of taxation that neuters any attempt to re-create this Stasi like agency.
How bout a consumption tax? That way, the millions of illegals the feds are allowing to pour into this country and use our infrastructure pay their fair share.
Having teachers (or any government employee) “pay” taxes was a pathetic attempt to keep them American.
I haven’t met a teacher yet who doesn’t vote for more taxes, knowing they’ll get compensated and more.
It’s Kabuke Theater. They can’t pay taxes, when they’re payed by taxes.
I don’t mean to stick my finger in your eye, but it would be nice to be honest about it. I know there are some very good teachers out there. There are also a lot of bad ones, but the tax situation is what it is regardless of that.
Their biggest complaint is that the work ethic of the students has degraded over the years. My daughter and her fellow teachers were disappointed by getting an email from a failing student that was blaming her failure on the teachers. The student had not come to teachers for help and had not submitted the homework that had been assigned and clearly identified in writing. The student blew off the assignment and will fail. All the teachers could do was to notify the parents and school administrators.
It is disheartening that such unsubstantiated accusations are being made at a time when we are seeking to provide the IRS with funding and staffing to address noncompliance by the wealthiest taxpayers.”
*************************
Horsefeathers.
If compliance by the “wealthiest taxpayers” was actually the goal, they should have not only kept Trump’s policies, but expanded on them.
So what did Trump actually do? Think nasty nancy went around squealing about how Trump was only helping the rich in late 2017 because that was what she actually knew from reading the bill?
Not a chance.
Trump’s tax bill actually stopped several of the “special deductions” used by the wealthy to avoid paying their taxes. Nasty nancy herself used them, she knows what it’s all about. She voted them in for pete’s sake.
The one clause Trump added that ended the ability to write off state income taxes cost nasty nancy a bundle. Of course, the biden admin will end that one.
Also, as of Jan. 2018 when the Trump tax bill took efect, she could no longer write off her entire property taxes, only the first $10,000. That means she had to actually PAY around $130,000 in property taxes, which YOUR taxes had to cover until Trump came along. The IRS has to get that same $130,000 somewhere, the government already spent it, so they take it from YOUR pocket instead. Multiply that by thousands of wealthy individuals across the country who can no longer write off that kind of taxes, they have to actually pay their way for once. And you wonder why the roads around your area are so horrible...find out where city council lives and look at their roads...and they are the ones who write off their property taxes, thanks to pelosi, biden and their ilk.
There was another special deduction having to do with capitol gains interest income, I can’t remember the details, but that one went away too, and cost nasty nancy a bundle.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Trump’s tax bill eliminated about 8 or 10 special deductions the rich have used for many years, and most people aren’t even aware of, which is why nasty nancy hires a CPA to do her taxes. But she knows, because she voted to put many of them into the tax code to begin with.
What the biden admin is doing is not aimed at making the wealthy pay their taxes, it’s about sucking more annd more out of the average guy, that is who will actually pay more taxes. The wealthy will do what they always do, hire a CPA to find every penny they can write off, and donate large dollars to politicians...swamp critters...who will make sure it stays that way.
Notice I didn’t say what biden is doing? I don’t think he does a thing, they keep him as far away from policy making as they can. That addle brained old fart barely knows what city he’s in 3/4 of the time. Probably worse than Reagan when Alzheimer’s really kicked in, he woke up in a different world every day, sometimes didn’t even recognize his own wife.
That’s why Phil Collins put the ending sequence into the video of the song “Land of Confusion”, where Reagan pushes the NUKE button instead of the NURSE one. Fabulous song and I love the video. I get the humor, no matter what you think of Reagan, I laugh at Trump too sometimes. The main difference is that Reagan’s problems with Alzheimers were much more effectively hidden for a long time before it finally leaked out to the public. This time with biden, it’s dementia instead, and it’s been far too visible to the general public for way too long. But I can’t rightly blame what is happening on him, it’s his handlers doing it all, biden himself can barely function, much less do his job..he couldn’t run a lemonade stand, much less a country. I have to wonder just how much hands on influence and power his wife is grabbing...that woman is almost as evil as hillary...almost...definitely a gold digger, that was my first impression long ago.
We should BUT now that it has been installed as a virtual welfare office (child credit prepays, stimulus payments etc) it is as ingrained in our system as is Social Insecurity.
Thank you.
My point is that they “file”, but their pay and even the taxes are paid by someone else. Some taxes are not even filed or paid, like Social Security in California. At best, it’s an attempt to get them to see the world the real taxpayers face.
Most can figure out that their “taxes” are paid by the same people who pay them. It is why you see the political divide that you do with those on the public payroll largely aligning with the Left, and, in this case, having no problem with a Left-politicized IRS.
Please ask yourself to whom you think this article was written. I don’t believe that it is winoes who do not file or pay any taxes. The IRS has many friends on the public payroll who see it as an instrument that serves them.
I imagine it doesn’t need to be someone in the IRS who released it. The USA has many intelligence agencies, some if which have advanced hacking abilities. As IRS is a Fed.gov agency, hacking probably isn’t even necessary. The back doors were probably built in.
I can't even plug in a USB memory stick or access a web page at work without it being logged. I expect more security and tracking at the IRS.
You can't make this Mitt up - it's better than the Babylon Bee!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.