(USNewsMag.com) – Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, required that the IRS provide a report on February 17 outlining the agency’s plans for spending over the next decade with the $80 billion it received.
Despite all its rhetoric about boosting taxpayer customer service, the government only plans to allocate $3.2 billion to that line item while spending an astounding $45.6 billion on enforcement.
The Internal Revenue Service missed its own deadline and didn’t publish the report until April 6 (a full 48 days late). There was hardly any useful information in the report.
There were no specifics in the study on how they plan to prevent an increase in audits for households with incomes below $400,000. Low-income individuals claiming the earned income credit were audited at a rate five times higher than the national average in 2022.
The report claims they will soon go digital, but it says it won’t have its high-priority documents online until fiscal year 2024/25. The section on digitization is full of buzzwords like putting into effect needed storage of data, but provides little specifics on how this would be accomplished. More information on background checks of employees and data encryption should be made available to high-earners whose information has been compromised.
The IRS urges taxpayers to “keep giving us more money” at the conclusion of the report. There are provisions in the tax law that help everyone, from homeowners to parents. Mortgage interest deductions and local or state tax exemptions are two examples of tax breaks that are accessible to a wide range of taxpayers. The issue has been identified by the IRS. The complexity of the tax system has increased enforcement efforts.
However, there are several alternatives to just paying the IRS an ever-increasing sum to address this issue. If we are going to give them billions more dollars with the caveat that they explain where the dollars will be spent, then we have a right to a thorough report that is submitted on time.
It doesn’t look well for the IRS’s massive $80 billion upgrade that it couldn’t even do this.
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