President Biden Seeks Supercharged IRS with Local Banks as Tax Auditors

• Every American must pay their taxes, but 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.
• Real concrete analysis is needed so that lawmakers can determine the right path forward without significantly intruding on the privacy of Americans.
• Without this data, President Biden’s proposal to spend $80 billion on an army of auditors and to turn local banks into chapters of the IRS to report on the gross transactions of your personal and business bank account is unacceptable to the American people.
• Flashback: The last time President Biden was in the White House in 2011, Democrats pushed for billions more in enforcement without providing clear, independent analysis supporting the funding, relying on information provided by activist groups aligned with their political objectives, and the IRS, which stood to gain funding.

Biden Continues Streak of Politicized IRS Leaks

• This could be the largest breach of private taxpayer data in American history—one that was intended to advance Democrats’ policy objective of supercharging the IRS and to justify raising taxes.
• Worse, ProPublica continues to publish stories exposing what was supposed to be confidential tax data and incorrectly describing tax provisions.
• Until the Biden administration gives answers, it will be very difficult for Americans to trust that their sensitive tax information is secure with the IRS. The IRS should not be rewarded with greater power over sensitive taxpayer data at a time when the Administration cannot even determine whether the information it already has is secure.
• Flashback: ProPublica previously received (and published) leaked taxpayer information from the IRS in 2012 that just so happened to include critics of the Democrat administration.

Political Targeting By IRS Threatens Religious Organizations and Critics Alike

• The IRS denied a Christian organization tax-exempt status because its emphasis on certain “Bible teachings are typically affiliated with the [Republican] Party and candidates.”
• This is particularly concerning given the agency’s prior history of targeting tax exempt groups for additional scrutiny based on their perceived political affiliation.
• Flashback: Former IRS official Lois Lerner apologized in 2013 that Tea Party groups and other groups had been targeted for audits of their applications for tax-exemption, which effectively delayed that status until they could no longer take effective part in the 2012 election.

CLICK HERE for a printable version of this one-pager.