(DailyDig.com) – On May 2, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealed their plan to substantially increase the rate at which they audit large corporations and wealthy citizens of the US. The IRS is striving to identify individuals or businesses engaging in tax evasion, with the aim of boosting the revenue they provide to the US Treasury.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which President Biden signed, allowed for an additional eighty billion dollars to fund the IRS to hire more agents to replace those who left the IRS in recent years. This has led to the current backlog of customer service, fewer audits, and slow processing of tax filings.
The IRS outlined their plan in a May 2 news release, outlining which aspects of their service will receive funding and how they plan to enhance their customer service to reduce the delays taxpayers are facing. According to the IRS, this last tax season allowed for more timely responses to taxpayer calls and increased enforcement of tax laws, which enabled the IRS to collect $520 million from wealthy citizens who either owed money from previous tax filings or had not filed one this year.
Danny Werfel, the commissioner of the IRS, stated that the people who had not paid their taxes led to a lack of funding to keep up the agency’s service to the taxpayers. He noted that their plan for the next few years is to sharply increase the number of audits they perform. He assured that the audits would only focus on individuals earning over $400,000 per year, excluding middle- to low-income taxpayers from their plans.
Werfel stated that they will be hiring enough agents to replace retirees and lost employees due to funding cuts in recent decades. In the 1990s, the IRS employed over 100,000 people, but it currently has just around 73,000. Their plan is to increase their workforce to about 102,000 employees over the next few years.
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