In January, small business owners welcomed the news that President Donald Trump reversed President Joe Biden’s plans to expand the IRS by hiring tens of thousands of new agents. Without necessary cultural and structural reforms, these agents would have continued targeting small businesses with lengthy, burdensome audits that are not only time-consuming and expensive but also crush the entrepreneurial spirit that drives the U.S. economy.
In 2023, a Government Accountability Office report revealed that more than 90% of audits are against middle-class families and small businesses under the $400,000 threshold, a shocking imbalance led by entrenched, politicized bureaucrats at an agency in dire need of reform.
Thankfully, reform is on the horizon with the leadership of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and his promotion of two IRS whistleblowers.
In March, the Treasury Department promoted IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler to leadership positions with a mandate to reform the IRS. Shapley and Ziegler spent years working on the Hunter Biden tax evasion case, but were removed from their positions and retaliated against by the very agency they served.
“I am pleased to welcome Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler to the Treasury Department, where they will help us drive much-needed cultural reform within the IRS,” said U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. “These veteran civil servants join us to help further the agency’s focus on collections, modernization, and customer service, so we can deliver a more effective and efficient IRS experience for hardworking American taxpayers. I appreciate Senator Grassley’s efforts in Congress to support whistleblower protections in order to improve transparency, accountability and root out the culture of retaliation.”
This cultural reform will take time, but small businesses that were once the target of the IRS can now focus on growing and expanding their businesses by hiring new workers and investing in new capital and resources, instead of hiring expensive lawyers and accountants for their defense.
Along with reforming the IRS, Trump should also reform and expand the Small Business Administration (SBA). So says Bruce de Torres, communications director for the American Small Business League (ASBL).
“99.9% of all businesses in America are small businesses. They are supposed to get 23% of all federal contracts. But the SBA lets almost all contracts go to the one-tenth of 1% that are big businesses, despite its claims to the contrary. If small businesses got the contracts to which they are entitled, millions of jobs would get created and the economy would boom.”
The ASBL’s Don’t Cheat Women project wants to raise from 5% to 15% the amount of federal contract dollars that must go to women-owned small businesses.
“Women are half the population. They own 40% of all businesses and sell what the government buys. Why should companies owned by men get 95% of federal contracts? If women got 15% of federal contracts, that would raise to 33% the contracts going to small businesses in general, pumping $264 billion into the economy and creating 3.3 million jobs on top of the two million that America typically creates every year. An economic boom of epic proportions, in other words.”
De Torres went on to say, “The government does next to nothing for small businesses. Only one or two% get SBA-backed loans. Only 0.2% of our 35 million small businesses get federal contracts. Everyone should go to DontCheatWomen.com and see how to pressure Congress and the White House to reform and expand the SBA.”
Reforming the IRS is a welcome first step to unleash American ingenuity and drive the U.S. economy, but if the SBA and the federal government deny small businesses the mandatory minimum of federal contracts, small businesses, the engine of the American economy, are stuck in first gear as big businesses race across the finish line with the backing of the federal government.
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