The workforce of the Internal Revenue Service currently consists of over 93,000 employees to collect and process tax returns and enforce tax laws. While this number is daunting in and of itself, the IRS recently released its new budget which calls for an additional 1,056 new IRS employees citing specifically the new demands placed on the agency due to the new healthcare law. Beyond just more employees the burden of the healthcare law would require more facilities and new systems to handle the task; U.S. News and World Report put the cost to taxpayers at over $359 million in fiscal year 2012 alone.
Included in the report are specifics about what the new IRS employees would be tasked with. This ranges from collecting taxes from the new ten percent tax on indoor tanning services to new drug excise taxes. The tax collecting burden placed on the IRS greatly increases with the implementation of Obamacare and costs the taxpayers more and more money just to keep up with the agency’s requirements that will continue to skyrocket.
Beyond the budget of the IRS, in President Obama’s recently unveiled budget proposal he calls for an addition of 4,182 new IRS employees. In his budget proposal however, it is not clear what this mass of new workers would be doing or the purpose behind their hiring since no explanation is given in Obama’s budget proposal. It is clear however that in just one year it would cost taxpayers a minimum of $426 million just for the new hires.
To add some perspective, the American people are on the hook for over 20 new taxes signed into law with Obamacare which totals over $500 billion in new taxes collected by the government over the next ten years. In addition to this, the IRS is now permanently and vastly increasing the size of its workforce just to keep up with these new demands adding even more costs to the American people. Contrary to certain beliefs within the Obama administration, this one-two punch to taxpayers will not help the economy.
The best part is that Obamacare has not been fully implemented yet and won’t be totally implemented until 2014. This means that the IRS will not have a full grasp of what is needed until at least that time. Most people understand that the government doesn’t exactly have a great reputation for coming in under-budget, opening the door to even more expansion in the next few years. According to the new IRS budget with an increasingly Orwellian tone, there may be a need for more taxpayer funded employees added to the agency’s workforce to, “conduct focused examinations to encourage compliance.”