IRS isn’t hiring 87,000 agents tasked with middle-class audits

The Inflation Reduction Act, handed in August 2022, allotted about $80 billion in funding to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

After Congress handed the invoice, people on Twitter, together with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), claimed that the IRS funding would permit the company to rent 87,000 new agents tasked with auditing middle-class Americans.

Now, these claims are recirculating online after House Republicans passed a bill on Monday, Jan. 9 that may rescind $71 billion of that IRS funding. The Democratic-controlled Senate has vowed to disregard the invoice. 

Is the IRS hiring 87,000 new agents to extend middle-class audits?

No, the IRS isn’t hiring 87,000 new agents to extend middle-class audits.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 contains about $80 billion in funding for the IRS over the following 10 years. 

About $45.6 billion of that IRS funding will probably be put towards bills for IRS tax enforcement companies by way of September 2031, together with hiring extra workers. 

But the claims that this funding will probably be used to rent 87,000 new agents particularly tasked with audits are false.

The textual content of the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t specify a variety of new hires for the IRS. The 87,000 quantity comes from a May 2021 report from the Treasury Department that estimated extra funding allotted by President Joe Biden’s administration would permit the IRS to rent practically 87,000 full-time workers by 2031. 

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That report was particular to earlier laws, and it’s not clear but how many individuals the IRS will rent with the Inflation Reduction Act funding.

The majority of IRS hires would fill positions of individuals leaving the company over the following decade, the Treasury Department stated. That contains employees members throughout departments, not simply agents tasked with audits. 

An estimated 52,000 IRS employees are anticipated to go away the company or retire within the close to future.

The IRS will decide the ultimate numbers and breakdown of potential new employees for the following decade within the coming months, however the addition of recent workers gained’t imply elevated audits for middle-class Americans, in line with the Treasury and IRS. 

“New staff will be hired to improve taxpayer services and experienced auditors who can take on corporate and high-end tax evaders, without increasing audit rates relative to historical norms for people earning under $400,000 each year,” a spokesperson for the Treasury Department stated. 

In a letter in August 2022, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig additionally assured Senate members that the company wouldn’t “increase audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans.”

According to the Treasury Department spokesperson, “the resources to modernize the IRS will be used to improve taxpayer services, from answering the phones to improving IT systems,” not simply audits. 

The IRS announced in late October 2022 that it had employed 4,000 new customer support representatives to assist reply telephones and supply different companies forward of the 2023 tax submitting season. Its purpose was so as to add one other 1,000 customer support representatives by the tip of 2022, bringing the whole variety of new hires to five,000.

Previous analyses of the company have revealed that the IRS wants extra workers. National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins stated in her midyear report to Congress, revealed in June 2022, that most of the challenges the IRS is going through “stem from inadequate staffing, including limited staffing in Submission Processing and telephone call centers.”

Rettig wrote in his letter that the IRS has “fewer front-line, experienced examiners in the field than at any time since World War II, and fewer employees than at any time since the 1970s.”

“Advances in technology have been helpful but have not kept pace with the ever-increasing responsibilities and challenges facing the IRS,” he stated. “As a result, the IRS has for too long been unable to pursue meaningful, impactful examinations of large corporate and high-networth taxpayers to ensure they are paying their fair share.”