PAST CONTROVERSIES: The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report on the lost tax records isn't the first instance of the IRS getting caught flat-footed in its handling of potentially very sensitive taxpayer information. It was also revealed that the IRS, crushed by paper backlogs during the pandemic, destroyed 30 million documents in March of 2021 in a move that prompted outrage from tax preparers around the nation. And Republicans have likewise hounded the agency about its accidental publication of 120,000 private tax files on its website in 2022 and how non-profit publication ProPublica somehow got its hands on a trove of returns belonging to the wealthiest Americans. “House Republicans secured an agreement to repurpose up to $21 billions of future IRS enforcement funds during the June debt-ceiling fight,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote last Friday in a response to the watchdog report. “The threat of cuts should warn the agency to get its leaky house in order before focusing on growing its audit program.” FUNDING BATTLES: Indeed, it turns out that Republicans have already maneuvered to cut a whole lot more than the $21.4 billion rescission agreed to under the debt limit deal between President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy. House Appropriations Committee Republicans have in fact proposed to slash $67 billion from the IRS, obscuring the additional cuts in a potpourri of unusual spending bills, including those for transportation, housing and urban development, and labor, health and human services, as Doug Sword reported in Tax Notes. According to a preview of this morning’s call by the Coalition for Free and Fair Filing, Igor Volsky of Groundwork Action plans to underscore how deleterious those GOP efforts would be and point to new research indicating that the IRS can return as much $12 from audits of wealthy taxpayers for every $1 invested in the agency. “In the past year, the IRS has revamped customer service and brought the agency closer to the modern world because of this funding, and now Republicans want to stonewall this modernization process,” Adam Ruben of the Economic Security Project says. “It is critical that we keep this momentum going if we hope to see free and simple tax filing become a reality.” A side note: We reported last week that former IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig is hoping to do his own part to improve tax administration from the sidelines and has joined the board of a company called K1x that digitizes schedule K-1s using AI technology. You may want to watch this area. While the improvements in tax administration at the IRS may be subject to the whims of congressional appropriators in a given year, the private sector is also working to harness new technology to automate monotonous tasks and make filing season less of a headache. SMITH ON WEISS: The top tax writer in the House isn’t all that enthusiastic about the news, which was reported last week by our Betsy Woodruff Swan, that U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss has been appointed special counsel in the long-running probe of Hunter Biden. “Unfortunately, A.G. Garland selected the very same Biden-aligned U.S. Attorney ofDelaware, David Weiss, who oversaw the clearly bungled investigation into Hunter Biden and who was the architect of his sweetheart plea deal,” House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) said in a Friday press release, asserting that the appointment is, in fact, designed to hamper congressional investigations of the president’s son. Smith was responsible for releasing the testimony of two IRS whistleblowers alleging political interference in the Hunter Biden probe and, along with Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan(R-Ohio), has sought testimony from several other federal employees involved in the case. And here’s a notable comment from Smith on Fox Business regarding the development: “Where the facts are leading, I don’t see how we don’t go into an impeachment inquiry.”
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment