PolitiFact also acknowledged the origin of the number but wrote “it isn’t set in stone.” Reuters used the same phrasing in its reporting, “The 87,000 figure does exist, buried within a May 2021 Treasury Department report.” Yahoo News wrote, “Republicans are taking that figure from a chart buried in a report the Treasury Department issued last year.” However, many news outlets pushed back at the use of this figure and disputed that these FTEs would all be new hires, including the following: Below is the table as it appeared in the Treasury report. This would more than double the size of its current workforce: the IRS employed 78,661 FTE positions in FY 2021 and 79,808 during FY 2022. The report includes a table showing that they would use the funding boost to add precisely 86,852 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees over the next decade. The Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, published The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Plan, laying out the case for expanding the IRS and significantly increasing enforcement activities. The figure is from an official government report from May 2021 when the Biden administration was pushing for passage of the original “Build Back Better” plan. 87,000 Or Not: How Many New Staff is the IRS Hiring?Īfter passage of the IRA, critics of the tax enforcement measure warned that taxpayers would face intensified scrutiny from an IRS supersized with nearly 87,000 new staff. This paper explores many of the claims surrounding the expanded IRS. Now that the IRA is law, there are concerns regarding how the $80 billion for the IRS will be used, who will feel the brunt of increased audits and other new enforcement efforts, how many new “agents” will be hired with the money, and how much revenue will be raised. Whether it happens through innocent mistakes, misunderstandings of the laws, or willful tax fraud, the Department of the Treasury estimates that people underpay their taxes by $600 billion per year (This estimate itself is in dispute, a subject covered more in a May 2021 NTU Foundation policy paper.). Most of the money is intended to increase tax enforcement and reduce the “tax gap.” The tax gap is a measure of the difference between what people and businesses actually pay in taxes versus how much the IRS thinks they really owe. The recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included nearly $80 billion in new funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
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