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Biden Admin Targets Lower & Middle Income Earners with $600 IRS Reporting Requirement

February 07, 2022

As of January, the Biden Administration requires Americans to report to the IRS all business transactions using third-party payments – like Venmo and PayPal – for goods or services over $600 thanks to a provision hidden in Democrats’ partisan $2 trillion stimulus bill from March.

 

  • The new reporting requirements will ensure anyone who sells a couch or pays a babysitter electronically could trigger further IRS scrutiny.
  • This violates President Biden’s own promise that greater tax enforcement wouldn’t hit lower or middle-income Americans.
  • President Biden is still demanding $80 billion in spending for an army of auditors to turn local banks into chapters of the IRS and increase audits for every American with a job.

 

The IRS already has plenty on its plate. It only recently announced that it will shift around employees to address the painful 16-million tax return backlog after Republicans have urged action to help American taxpayers for more than a year.

 

President Biden’s push for a more invasive, supercharged IRS reports more of Americans’ personal transactions and burdens small business owners and entrepreneurs with more audits.

 

KEY BACKGROUND:

  • President Biden’s plan to supercharge the IRS with $80 billion in mandatory funding and 87,000 new IRS agents will lead to drastically higher audit rates for all Americans at every income level according to the Congressional Budget Office.
  • There’s very little evidence suggesting the IRS estimate on unpaid taxes (dubbed the “tax gap”) is accurate, given that it may be based on data from seven years ago or wild guesses on foreign transactions, cryptocurrency, concealed income, and other sectors.
  • Given the agency’s inability to protect confidential taxpayer data over the last decade, the American people are rightfully concerned about the implications of giving the IRS a vast amount of new private data. 
  • Republicans have introduced the Tax Gap Reform and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Enforcement Act, which allows for a better understanding of the tax gap, provides smarter enforcement, ensures the IRS uses all of the resources at its disposal, and addresses the expertise gap at the IRS.

 

READ: Top 10 Ways to Get Yourself Surveilled by the IRS