No more surprise IRS visits, say House Republicans
Republicans on the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued a report Friday saying the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has agreed to roll back its practice of making surprise visits to taxpayers.
"The Committee’s and Select Subcommittee’s oversight revealed, and led to the swift end of, the IRS’s weaponization of unannounced field visits to harass, intimidate, and target taxpayers," the report said, according to Fox News.
"Taxpayers can now rest assured the IRS will not come knocking without providing prior notice — something that should have been the IRS’s practice all along."
Special agents in the IRS Criminal Investigations unit, who are armed, are still expected to make surprise visits.
The report comes after Republican lawmakers discovered earlier this year that IRS agents have been arriving unannounced at the homes of private taxpayers, sometimes using fake names and providing false information to gain access to the homes. The IRS has also made surprise visits to allegedly intimidate witnesses testifying against the federal government.
In June, House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) demanded answers after an IRS agent lied about his identity to gain entry to a private home and harass its resident. In a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, Jordan described how in April, an agent with the IRS Criminal Division — the agency’s armed corps — made an unannounced “bizarre” visit to an Ohio resident.
The agent identified himself as Agent “Bill Haus” and told the resident he was there to discuss an estate of which she was a fiduciary. He claimed she had failed to complete some filings and owed the IRS a “substantial amount.”
When the taxpayer showed that she had, in fact, paid all taxes on the estate, Agent “Haus” revealed the “real” reason he was there, which was because the decedent was delinquent on several filings.
The resident called her attorney, who instructed the agent to leave the house. But Agent “Haus” refused.
“I am an IRS agent, I can be at and go into anyone’s house at any time I want to be,” he said.
Before finally leaving the house, the agent threatened the taxpayer that unless she provided the required paperwork within a week, he would freeze her assets and place a lien on her house.
When he left, the woman called the Marion, Ohio Police Department (MPD), believing she was the victim of a scam. Police ran the agent’s license plates, which were registered under a different name. When they contacted the agent, “Haus” admitted he had used a false name. The sheer illegality of this led police to believe that he was indeed a scammer, and warned the agent he would be arrested if he came to the taxpayer’s home again.
In response, the agent filed a complaint against the officer with the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), and the MPD learned that “Haus” was, in fact, a legitimate IRS agent.
“This behavior from an IRS agent to an American taxpayer — providing an alias, using deception to secure entry into the taxpayer’s home, and then filing an Inspector General complaint against a police officer examining that matter — is highly concerning,” Jordan wrote in the letter to IRS Commissioner Werfel.
It is unclear if any disciplinary action was taken since the incident occurred in April.
Jordan also referenced a similar incident in March, when the IRS visited journalist Matt Taibbi at his home as he was testifying before Congress about the weaponization of the federal government.
Taibbi, an award-winning journalist and author, was tapped by Elon Musk last year to report on the Twitter Files, a tranche of internal communications from Twitter’s previous management team. The documents revealed the federal government’s deep collusion with the platform to silence the Biden administration’s political opponents.
On March 9th Taibbi provided testimony on what he found in the Twitter Files to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. He learned later that while he was testifying, an IRS agent came to his home unannounced and left a note at Taibbi’s home instructing the journalist to call him in four days. When Taibbi did, the agent told him that his 2018 and 2021 tax returns were being rejected due to concerns about identity theft. The IRS specifically added that the issues are “not monetary.”
Taibbi says that his 2018 tax returns were in fact accepted over four-and-a-half years ago and provided documentation to the House Judiciary Committee proving that fact, according to the Wall Street Journal. In all those years, the IRS never notified Taibbi or his accountant that there were any concerns about identity theft, and the agency reportedly owes Taibbi a “considerable” tax refund.
The author’s 2021 tax return had been rejected twice, despite his accountant filing with an IRS-approved PIN number. Given that Taibbi had already been in communication with the IRS regarding the issue, it did not justify a house call from an IRS agent.
