The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy on Saturday announced that bill for funding 87000 new Internal Revenue Service agents will be repealed when his party comes back to power, CNN reported.
"I know the night is late, but when we come back our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents," he said amid applause from the Republican caucus. "You see, we believe government should be to help you, not go after you," said McCarthy.
Although, the same report claimed that the number is misleading. The Treasury Department estimated in 2021 that a nearly USD 80 billion investment in the IRS could allow the agency to hire 86,852 full-time employees over the course of a decade. But that figure accounts for all workers, not solely enforcement agents, according to the CNN report.
Notably, the Internal Revenue Service has gotten a lot of attention on social media - specifically, an obscure proposal by the Biden administration to widen the authority to root out tax evasion. The questioned decision will allow the IRS to get annual and aggregated reports of inward and outward flow from bank accounts with a minimum of USD 600, according to another CNN report by Holmes Lybrand from October 8, 2021.
The same CNN report mentions, In May, the Treasury Department proposed a plan to "create a comprehensive financial account information reporting regime."
Under that proposal, banks would be required to submit annual reports to the IRS on "gross inflows and outflows" on accounts - both business and personal - with at least USD 600 or with transactions of at least USD600 in a year. Though, as the Bloomberg reporting suggests, Democrats on the Hill are still hammering out the details.
Until legislation is passed by Congress, it's unclear how the IRS's authority could expand, what the reporting threshold would be and who would be affected.
Regarding the data's usefulness to the US, the CNN report a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation Garrett Watson saying, it would "require years of software updates" in order for the IRS to effectively use the information they want. "That's probably the place to prioritize first and revisiting this (proposal) later, once they actually deploy the software that should make it useful,"
Contradicting McCarthy, the Joe Biden administration wants to give IRS an additional USD 80 billion over the time of 10 years to increase the agency's workforce by 87000 new employees and also invest in technological improvements over the same time.
( With inputs from ANI )
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