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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has a long history of mismanagement, scandal, and taxpayer abuses. President Biden and congressional Democrats seem to believe throwing more money at the problem will fix the systemic issues within the agency. President Biden recently proposed hiring 87,000 new IRS agents, which will only make matters worse. To delve further into the history of tyranny at the IRS, ATR President Grover Norquist invited author Jim Bovard on to his podcast Leave Us Alone with Grover Norquist to explain why more money won’t help the IRS and will lead to taxpayers facing additional harassment. Bovard is a longtime liberty activist and author, writing extensively on the faulty IRS.  

On the history of the IRS abuse and overreach, Bovard notes:  

“During the Obama-era, the Obama IRS was going after a lot of conservatives and conservative organizations…The Institute for Free Speech filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee about how members of the Senate were telling the IRS who to audit. The Senate Ethics Committee looked at the complaint and brushed it off and basically said Senators have a right to do that; and this is a level of arbitrary power that’s absolutely chilling.”  

Norquist discussed his time serving on the Commission on Restructuring the IRS: 

“I’ve talked to my conservative friends…a lot of them are being audited and I talk to my left-wing friends and say is the IRS just doing a lot of audits and nobody on the left was being audited. I asked the head of the IRS how that could be, and he said they had an algorithm that was completely fair, independent, almost like a computer program. I said that’s great could we see it. He replied that [the algorithm] is a secret and we have to trust them.”  

On President Biden’s plan to spend $80 billion to hire 86,852 new IRS agents, which would more than double the agency’s workforce: 

“Perhaps we ought to think about what those agents have done in the past and how they’ve been used. 

Listen to the full episode below:

Leave Us Alone with Grover Norquist is a weekly video and audio podcast found on all major podcast streaming services: