Over 20,000 IRS agents to depart agency

Roughly 22,000 IRS agents have accepted the Trump administration’s buyout offer and are set to depart the agency, according to the New York Times. 

Since January, 5,000 IRS workers have resigned. The administration has also laid off about 7,000 probationary employees, although those firings are being challenged in court. The recent buyouts mean the IRS stands to lose a third of the 100,000-strong workforce it built under the Biden administration. One of the employees who accepted Trump’s buyout offer is Acting Commissioner Melanie Krause.

Legacy media and Democrat politicians are frustrated by the staffing cuts, which means less auditing of American taxpayers.

“The cuts have already caused the I.R.S. to abandon some audits, current and former employees said, and taxpayers may feel more emboldened to try and avoid paying taxes if the I.R.S. is diminished,” the New York Times lamented.

Virginia Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger also registered her disappointment at the downsizing of the tax collection agency.

“Happy Tax Day. Just a reminder that while Virginians are filing their taxes, the Trump administration is cutting IRS staff and making it harder for people across the Commonwealth to get the help they need,” she wrote on X.

IRS: Audits for thee but not for me

An investigation by the Treasury Department Inspector General last year found that thousands of IRS employees owed a collective $30 million in back taxes under the Biden administration. The inspector general also discovered that IRS management has been lenient on employees who are tax non-compliant, including those willfully committing tax fraud.

Meanwhile, the Biden IRS increased audits on low-income American families. According to a report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the IRS in 2022 subjected low-income taxpayers to “unbelievably high” audit rates — over five times more than nearly everyone else. On the other hand, just 1.1% of millionaires — those who earned a million dollars or more in positive income — were audited. 

The IRS found it easier to conduct correspondence audits through the mail, which is more feasible with lower-income tax returns. Such audits are automated and usually begin with a letter from the IRS asking the taxpayer for more documentation. In FY 2022, 85% of all 1040 audits began with such a letter, compared with 48% of millionaire audits. 

Low-income Americans ‘are easy marks’

The report explained that lower-income wage earners “are easy marks in an era when the IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn’t have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions.” 

While the chance of a millionaire being audited increased to 2.8% last year, this still left nearly 700,000 millionaires who escaped scrutiny. 

Small businesses ‘won’t fight back’

National Taxpayers Union Foundation Executive Vice President Joe Hinchman told the New York Post why Biden’s IRS targeted small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

“The IRS will have to target small and medium businesses because they won’t fight back,” said Hinchman. “We’ve seen this play out before. . . . [T]he IRS says, ‘We’re going after the rich,’ but when you’re trying to raise that much money, the rich can only get you so far.”  

Hinchman explained that the IRS typically goes after SMBs also because they don’t have the financial bandwidth to challenge the agency in court.  

“The approach here is to double the IRS workforce, take the leash off, and see how much they can collect,” Hinchman added in 2022. “I think they’ll collect it but it will be quite painful.”

‍