The ink is barely dry on the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates $80 billion over 10 years to help modernize IRS technology systems and provide more effective tax enforcement and collection. Yet already, Republican critics like Sen. John Thune of South Dakota are complaining that the needed funds will do little more than allow the IRS to “spend more time harassing taxpayers around this country.”
Given that between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year in taxes goes uncollected, perhaps some American individuals and corporations deserve to be harassed a little. Especially when you consider that, where middle class American wage-earners have a 95% reliability rate for paying their fair share of taxes, the top 1% of wealthy Americans consistently fail to report (and are very good at hiding) 20% of their income.
For years, Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress have blocked giving the IRS the resources it needs to update its computer systems and prevent the steady erosion of its enforcement capabilities. As noted by Charles Rettig, a Trump appointee and IRS commissioner, the “areas of challenge for the agency [are] large corporate and global high-net-worth taxpayers,” not the middle-income Americans that Senator Thune pretends to be protecting.
