Image of the IRS Building "Internal Revenue Service" by saturnism is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.

The IRS purposefully destroyed 30 million taxpayer documents, according to an audit report  published Monday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). Rather than work through its backlog, agency brass decided to just destroy the documents instead:

The report states:

“This audit was initiated because the IRS’s continued inability to process backlogs of paper-filed tax returns contributed to management’s decision to destroy an estimated 30 million paper-filed information return documents in March 2021.”

The destroyed documents include W-2 forms and 1099 forms among many others. Taxpayers have spent millions of hours trying to reach the agency via telephone or mail, with no luck. Some amount of this correspondence related to taxpayers trying to prove to the IRS that they did indeed send in their tax forms — the same tax forms destroyed by the agency.

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig recently testified that 53% of IRS agents now work from home rather than coming into the office.  

Rettig also noted the IRS is only answering “19 to 20 percent” of taxpayer phone calls to the agency.

IRS employees also spend hundreds of thousands of hours a year doing work for their labor union, rather than providing taxpayer service. In 2019 for example, employees spent 353,820 hours doing union work while on the job.

The IRS union PAC gives 100% of its political spending to Democrats.  

The TIGTA report documents several areas of IRS incompetence. The agency does not even keep a list of forms that cannot be e-filed:

“Of particular concern is the fact that the IRS does not have an accurate and comprehensive list of individual and business tax forms that are not able to be e-filed.”

Congressional Democrats and President Biden enacted the “American Rescue Plan” in 2021 which will impose a massive paperwork burden and require the issuance of tens of millions of additional 1099 forms, just the type of form destroyed by the IRS.

Once again, the IRS has some explaining to do.