ATR Federal Affairs Manager Isabelle Morales called out the IRS in remarks on Capitol Hill on Tax Day, April 18. Video of her remarks can be found here.
Morales said:
“I’m here to briefly touch on the IRS’s ongoing failure to complete a tax complexity report that was mandated by Congress.
The IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, along with other IRS reforms, required that the IRS complete a tax complexity report every year.
As stated in the law, the report shall include any recommendations, A) for reducing the complexity of the administration of the federal tax laws and B) for repeal or modification of any provision the commissioner believes adds undue and unnecessary complexity to the administration of federal tax laws.
The IRS has only completed this report twice — in 2002 and 2000. Now, it’s been over 20 years since the IRS complied with this mandate from Congress.
As with many things, the IRS blamed this failure on a lack of manpower and funding by saying that this task would require the labor of a whopping two employees working through the year.
Personally, I would be more sympathetic to this excuse if it wasn’t the case that Treasury employees — 80% of which worked for the IRS — spent over 350,000 hours on Taxpayer-Funded Union Time while on the job. That’s the equivalent of 170 employees working on union activities full-time.
So evidently, the IRS has the means to complete this report. This is of course just one example of a larger theme: When given the opportunity and the legal mandate to find better ways to be better storers of taxpayer dollars, the IRS doesn’t take that opportunity.
Because if the IRS were to actually seek out ways to run more efficiently, they wouldn’t keep getting away with blaming all of their failures on a lack of funding and they wouldn’t get to keep coming to Congress asking for more and more money every year.
And while this dynamic seems so transparent to most of us, the left still wants to give the IRS more money and more power.
The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, gave the IRS $80 billion in new funding for the hiring of 87,000 new agency employees — not to fulfill their most basic duties like completing the tax complexity report — but to extract more money from already struggling working families and small businesses.
And apparently $80 billion wasn’t enough because President Biden’s proposed budget this year included $43.2 billion in additional IRS funding.
The left also, as I said, wants to expand the powers of the IRS. What’s especially relevant, especially today is that Democrats have been pushing for government-run tax preparation, empowering the IRS to act as tax preparer, collector, and auditor — creating a very blatant conflict of interest and serious privacy concerns of course.
But what a task to take on when you can’t find two employees to produce an annual report to improve your agency’s performance.
So we call on the IRS to resume the creation of this report. And when that doesn’t happen, we hope congressional Republicans will hold them responsible for their failures.”
For further details on the IRS failure to complete the complexity report, see this post.