Public Comment

If Congress really believes that there is not enough money to support and expand publicly financed social programs, then why has it one year after another cut the budget of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whose income from audits far exceed the Agency's budget? Do you know what members of Congress already know but act as if they don't -- that the average IRS auditor collects revenue which is twenty times his or her salary? Yet the annual cuts in its budget since 2010 have resulted in a staff reduction of about 8,000 employees. Not only has it become far more difficult for a taxpayer to reach a live staff person for assistance. Substantial budget cuts have appreciably reduced the capacity of the IRS to audit individuals and corporations. 

According to the IRS, the federal government is losing about $450 million in taxes every year. That money could be made available to sustain and improve many of our inadequately funded public programs. What accounts, then, for the persistent congressional assault on the IRS? You probably guessed right. Many in the business community have been deeply troubled by audits. They have persuaded the majority in Congress to weaken the agency's auditing capacity. 

It is very important to understand the tremendous antagonism of some in Congress toward the IRS. Take for example a Republican congressman, John Fleming of Louisiana, who proposed suspending for six months all new audits by the IRS while the Agency's biases could be investigated. His rational was that the IRS uses the audits for political purposes by disproportionately auditing conservative groups. That some auditors might be biased against right wing organizations is not clear because the agency also audited many liberal organizations as well. 

What is very clear is that Fleming's own politics makes him an opponent of the IRS. He continually urges that taxes be cut and regulations slashed. He also wants to abolish Obamacare, which for tax related reasons, the IRS is involved in. From Fleming's perspective the IRS is an enemy of the business community. 

The IRS recognizes that to maximize its effectiveness a larger percentage of the rich and big corporations should be audited Overall, the auditing rate is about one percent. But according to the public record in one recent year the chance of individuals being audited is about ten times greater for the richest then those with lower incomes. About 17 percent of big corporations compared with 1.2 percent of small corporations were audited. It is no surprise, then, that the upper class is very unhappy with IRS policy. 

So while progressives have been attempting to persuade Congress to increase corporate and individual income taxes, the failure of many in the higher echelons to pay the taxes they do owe has received relatively little attention. We can expect the problem of tax cheating to become considerably worse as the ability of the IRS to provide oversight continues to diminish. Although it is a very difficult problem for progressives to overcome we need to find ways of addressing the indispensible issue of oversight. Tax cheating is very demoralizing to the American public because it is they who are being cheated. Indeed, what Congress has done on behalf of the have-a-lots at the expense of the have-a-little taxpayers is a very heavy price most Americans are paying in their quality of life.