The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is an absolute dumpster fire. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen gave the agency a 6-month deadline to disclose how they would spend the additional $80 billion in funding provided by Congress. Still, the IRS missed the deadline and doesn’t appear worried. Taxpayers deserve increased transparency and accountability from the IRS to ensure that our tax dollars are used effectively and efficiently.
Check out Grover’s latest episode of the Leave Us Alone Podcast to learn more about the incompetence and negligence surrounding the IRS.
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Episode Transcript:
Hi, Grover Norquist here. I’m the President of Americans for Tax Reform and welcome to the Leave Us Alone podcast. We work at Americans for Tax Reform to keep taxes low but we also focus on the guys who come and get the money from you. Our friends at the irs, and they’re been in the news recently because the Democrat party and Biden said, if we give them 80 billion, they’ll hire 87,000 more IRS agents. Now, about 3 billion of that 3.2 billion is gonna hire people to answer the phones. And if you’ve tried to call the irs, you know that often when you call, nobody picks up the phone, ever. I mean, they’ll tell you, call back tomorrow. We’re not listening to anymore. At least at American Airlines, they, they’ll tell you, you know, they play that nice music and say, just wait a while, <laugh>, eventually we’ll be back.
The IRS will actually tell you to go away. So they’re gonna spend 3.2 billion on people that answer the phone. And about 48 billion to have agents to go be annoying and check your Venmo income back and forth. So there’s an incredible increase in the lack of privacy that we’re going to have as Americans. The government’s gonna be looking over our shoulders all the time, offering to do our taxes for us. And I guess one of the questions is, how’d we get here? What, what, why are we doing this? The democrat position is that everybody out there is a tax cheat, or at least millions and gillions are. And if they had more IRS agents going through people’s tips and so on, they could scrounge more money, particularly out of self-employed people, out of independent contractors. Waiters, waitresses, people who cut your hair barbershops.
Those are the people they’re, they’re gonna be targeting. Biden likes to say he is going after rich people, but if you read the IRS stuff, they, they tell you small business, self-employed. The guys over at General Motors already have their own IRS agents looking all over ’em. Major corporations are all public information that’s pretty transparent. What they really wanna go after is self-employed people, independent contractors, people with the side, Diego, drive Uber, as well as have a business. That’s where they think they’re gonna get billions and billions of dollars. So where are we all on this? Should the irs, can they competently spend 80 billion? Will they do something useful with it? I guess I would ask first, how are they doing Now, before the 80 billion couple years ago we discovered because one of the inspectors was walking through the Utah large structure for the irs and discovered that they had destroyed 30 million tax documents like a W two or a 10 99 30 million in that one structure alone in Utah.
Not the whole country, 30 million there, 30 million if you, or I said, I don’t have a, not 10 99, I won’t give you my w2. We get fined, literally fined for not sharing that the government’s destroyed 30 million of them. And if you just stacked them top, you know, straight up two miles high, two miles high. Now, they didn’t announce this, they didn’t tell you or me, they didn’t even tell Congress. They didn’t tell anybody what they were doing when they destroyed it. Turns out one of the inspectors who’s supposed to be looking for stuff like this, found out about it, wrote about it a little bit. Nothing happened for a year. Nobody in Congress was highlighted as to what it was. No press per, you know, the press is always telling you how they dig stuff out. This was in an official document. Nobody in the press read it and wrote about it for a year.
So the inspector wrote about it again and started pushing it out, and it got a little attention. And the republicans in Congress, in, in the committee said, could you tell us more about it? And their answer was, we’re investigating. We can’t tell you anything cuz we’re looking into it now. 30 million destroyed documents, it’s a secret, won’t tell you. They finally found out that there was a memo about the 30 million destroyed documents as to why they did it. Could we please see the memo explaining why you did it? No, it would make us look bad is what they said. Now, this is an agency that wants more money, and they won’t even tell you that asked, did you burn the 30 million? Did you shred them? Did you bury them? Did you drop them out of the back of a truck? How did you get rid of ’em?
Secret, they won’t tell you. Add to that, that when you look at the political giving of the union, that represents the treasury officers, most of them are, are IRS agents. They give a hundred percent of the money they give to political parties, goes to Democrats that pack a hundred percent of the money. That 22, 20 22 went to Democratic candidates. So we have a one-party structure inside the federal government. One party, not two parties, one party destroying 30 million documents when they want to. When Congress asks to look at it, they say, we don’t intend to share it with you. Nobody in the Obama administration has called them on the phone or dragged them in to say, share this with the American people. It’s a secret. Oh, and there’s more. It gets worse. It’s like those late-night shows about knives and stuff, except it doesn’t get better and more, it gets worse and more the IRS under its union contract is allowed to take people who are supposed to be working.
You and I are paying their salaries. They’re supposed to be working on taking your money and maybe answering your phone calls when you ask where the money went. But 1,421 folks over at the Treasury Department, mostly IRS agents don’t work for the government. They work for the union. We pay them, taxpayers pay them. They work for the union. 353,000 man-hours in one year. That’s in 2019. Couple years ago, they don’t report very quickly. But in 2019, we know 3005, 353,000 hours that we were paying people, they were actually doing union work, which means helping the modern Democratic party get stuff done. Your tax dollars are being fled through the IRS into the Democratic Party. And their structures both as PAC Money and as vol volunteers paid volunteers. This is a, this is a real challenge. I served on the commission on restructuring the irs back in the late nineties because we had these problems under Clinton and the Clinton people were busy auditing the National Rifle Association heritage, all the conservative groups.
And I asked the left of center groups, I said, are you being audited? Is this a problem? They said, no. They, they put me on the commission and they’re with all these other guys on this commission. And the, the head of the IRS comes and talks to us. And I told him, I said, look, when I ask guys on the right, are you being audited? Big groups all being audited, no reason for it, just politically chosen, and the left wing groups not being audited. Why is that? He said, oh, well, we have this algorithm and, and, and it’s terribly nonpartisan and fair. And that’s how we pick people. It’s not partisan. I said, that’s great. Show it to us. And the guy said, well, it’s a secret. We, I can’t show it to you. I won’t show it to you, but it just happens to hit one political party or one political structure, not another.
Now we, we came up with some ideas. We passed, the Congress passed a law, very little, got better or fixed. Now, when with the 80 billion, go back to, what are they gonna do with 80 billion, hiring 87,000 more agents. They also, by the way, are gonna spend 403 million of your tax dollars, my tax dollars, 400, 3 million to buy more cars for the irs. Now, previous inspectors at the IRS pointed out that there are more cars owned by the government for the IRS than there are people who are supposed to be driving those cars. Who’s driving those cars? And when asked, because if you’re a small business and you say, this is my car for my business, if you drive it to go on vacation, you don’t get to deduct the cost as part of your business expenses. So you have to keep track how much is part of the business if you have a car or a truck, and how much you’re using it for your own personal use.
And if you don’t keep track of it, you’re in big trouble with the irs. Well, the IRS doesn’t keep track of the, in any meaningful way, according to the inspectors of who uses those government cars, who’s going on vacation with them, who’s driving to and from skiing and, and waterboarding and all, you know, all the different things that, that people like to do with cars that don’t belong to them, belong to the government that they should not be doing. They don’t keep track. Now, if you’re a small businessman and you have a government a car owned by your business and you wanna use it privately, you’d better note that and pay taxes on that. And that distinction, this is a huge problem, but we’re gonna give them $400 million more in cars, even though they’re not using the ones they have. So they got $80 billion.
Congress voted this, this, you know, a couple years ago. And so what happens now? Well, the Secretary of of Treasury, Democrat Yellen, who works for Biden, she wrote a letter more than six months ago saying, okay, you got six months to write down how you’re gonna spend it, not about you. But if I was asking for somebody for 80 billion as the IRS wanted 80 billion from tax taxpayer, I’d have written down what it was gonna go for before I asked for the money. And I certainly wouldn’t be giving anybody 80 billion unless they had a plan on how to spend it. You may remember we heard Biden say, well, here’s how they’re gonna spend it. He’s just making that up. That was not the plan. He, he didn’t write the plan. It’s not like he wrote a plan, said to the I IRS here, this is what I want you to spend the money on.
They asked the IRS what they’re gonna spend. It. Didn’t tell ’em, asked them <laugh>. So Congress said, here’s 80 billion, threw it at him. And then the guys playing and all that cash, like Scrooge McDuck and the cartoons you know, they’re gonna write a rule. Well, couple weeks ago we hit the six months, and some of the people in the press who remembered that they were supposed to get a report in six months called and the IRS said, Nope, not yet. <Laugh>. We’ve, we haven’t done that. Haven’t done our homework. We haven’t written it down. We don’t even have a start. We can’t even give you an outline. Now, these are the guys we gave 80 billion to, and a lot of left of center progressive groups are just livid at the IRS for being this incompetent and flip it. I mean, this is not their money. This is taxpayer money.
This is your money, our money. And these guys are going, well, we’ll tell you when we decide how to spend it. We’ll tell you on our own time, even though they technically work for the Secretary of Treasury, they’re supposed to be doing that. Oh, and it gets worse. You may have remembered that a couple years ago they passed a law. This was gonna raise a whole bunch of money. They were going to require that if then, if you got any money in from through Venmo or PayPal or Facebook Marketplace or Itsy or eBay and it came up to $600 over the course of a year, those platforms would tell the IRS you had that much income. Now, you may not have been income, you may have been collecting money from people to pay the rent. You may have all gone out for pizza a couple of times and put your money together through your pay and money coming into you through PayPal.
If you don’t have documentation for how you spent that and show that it was an expense, not income, you gotta pay federal income taxes on that. That’s your responsibility. Paypal’s not in charge of that. You are in charge of that, and there’re gonna be millions and millions of documents flying around electronic and paper. And you’re supposed to know exactly what the government has, what you have. And you know, you, you, you, you, you raise a bunch of kids and then you decide you, you don’t need the tricycles anymore and all the kids clothes and you sell it in a garage sale and you make $500, $700. It may have cost you thousands of dollars for all this old stuff. Do you have any of the receipts for tricycles and kids toys and kids clothes? Probably not. You’re gonna have to pay income taxes on that.
You can certainly get audited because you didn’t have the paperwork to prove that you paid for it. Buy a motorcycle, sell it later. You’re in trouble. Because unless you kept that documentation from x number of years ago about what you paid for it and have it, that money that comes in across, through PayPal or whatever, that’s income to you. This is a serious problem. It’s so bad that the administration said, you know what? We’re not gonna enforce that this year. Maybe. So it’s, it’s not happening this year in theory, but tomorrow morning you could wake up and they could put that back in. So it was a law. They passed a law, not a regulation. They passed a law and said everybody has to do this. And then they turned around and said, enough Americans are yelling loudly enough at how outrageous this is.
When the Republicans said, well, let’s repeal the law, and they offered legislation, the Deza said no. They said, no, we’re not gonna get rid of the law. But then the administration said, well, we’ll, we wanna enforce it. How about that? So any morning you could wake up and find out that we are having that law enforced, that’s a serious problem. This, again, this isn’t a rogue agency with one political party that it supports with people that we pay, that get volunteer time to go work for the Democratic Party through their union that send cash through their union to the Democratic party that destroys 30 million documents that if you destroyed at home, you would be paying hundreds of dollars in fines. But they can do it. 30 million of them. And that’s 30 million in Utah. Lord knows what happened in New York and Florida and Texas. That’s one place that the IRS works out of.
It’s one of their larger places, but it’s only one. And we don’t have an answer from them yet on that. So we have a serious problem with a runaway agency. Poorly run. Oh, by the way, 53% of IRS agents don’t go into work. They don’t go into work. They stay at home. Now, at one point, a lot of us did that with COVID, but the IRS got that put into their union contracts so that many of them are never coming back. They do admit that of the 47,000 who come to work, sometimes they won’t tell us they come half the time, 90% of the time, 10% of the time, secret. They won’t tell you what is this secret thing. There’s no secret in government. The government should be transparent for the American people to see exactly how it’s operated. They want our lives to be transparent to the government and the irs.
But so no privacy for us and privacy for them when they spend our money poorly or make mistakes that we really, and we wanna know what goes on, what really happens here. So right now they have the $80 billion the Republicans are talking about, trying to get some of that back, trying to pass the law that says, why don’t you just spend the 3 billion? That’s where you’re an answering phones. That might be useful. No more money, no more cars for you. Nevermind guns and ammunition, if you’ve probably heard about that in the newspapers, that, I dunno what the IRS is doing with that sort of stuff, but they’re spending more on it. We have a real opportunity, I think, in the next year, year and a half, to have some congressional hearings to find out what the IRS is doing to find out what happened to 30 million pieces of tax documents.
Maybe one of yours got burned up, shredded, sitting in a dumpster somewhere out in out in Utah the bottom of a ski hill. We need to find out what this is, and we need to not hand them more cash until they’ve reformed. So what I would like to say, and some final thoughts is to remind you to subscribe to the podcast if you’d like. We’re gonna be doing this on a regular basis. You can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts and or on Spotify and Americans for Tax Reform, YouTube channel, Americans for Tax Reform, YouTube channel or like us on Facebook. And look forward to talking to you again, trying to get you some information on what’s happening inside your government. As we get any answers from the irs, I’ll bring ’em to you right away. Thanks, Grover. Norquist here. Good evening.