Report: 60% of Additional Tax Audits Will Target Americans Making $75,000 or Less

(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

It won’t surprise you to learn that those 87,000 new agents the IRS will hire over the next few years are not going to be twiddling their thumbs or playing games on their computers all day.

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Many of them are going to be conducting audits. You might applaud the idea that the IRS was going to audit all those billionaires and multi-millionaires. And you’d be right to do so.

But what if the audits mostly targeted middle-class Americans?

Related: Holy Crapo Amendment! Dems Reject Middle Class Protection from Doubled IRS

The IRS will conduct 1.2 million additional annual audits, thanks to a doubling of its budget in the Inflation Reduction Act. And a GOP analysis based on recent audit rates and tax filing data shows that 60% of those audits will be targeting Americans with incomes of $75,000 or less.

Fox Business News:

The analysis, which is a conservative estimate based upon recent audit rates and tax filing data, shows that individuals with an annual income of $75,000 or less would be subject to 710,863 additional Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audits while those making more than $1 million would receive 52,295 more audits under the bill. The legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, would roughly double the IRS’ budget to increase enforcement and, therefore, federal tax revenue.

“Value shoppers at Walmart and other retailers, already struggling with higher prices and more expensive fuel to drive to the store, will get hit with 710,000 additional audits thanks to the Manchin-Biden Democrat bill,” House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Kevin Brady, R-Texas, said in a statement after releasing the study.

“Every retailer in the U.S. who cares about their hard-hit customers should be fighting to block this unnecessary harassment of hard-working Americans,” he added.

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Yes, but no tax increases for anyone except billionaires…er, millionaires…um, anyone making $400,000 or less, right?

Right?

The legislation doesn’t explicitly guarantee that Americans making under $400,000 won’t see tax increases under the IRS provision. The bill states that it is not “intended” to increase rates for taxpayers who aren’t in the top 1% of earners.

“There is language in this bill that provides some guidelines, but it’s not at all a guarantee,” William McBride, the vice president of federal tax and economic policy at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, told FOX Business in an interview. “It indicates that the intent of the increased spending is not to target those earning less than $400,000. But intent is a somewhat squishy word.”

Indeed, the IRS is going to ride that squish as far as it can.

The “New” IRS is supposed to raise $124 billion over the next ten years from taxpayers who didn’t “pay their fair share” of taxes. But the hard fact is, no one ever got rich in America paying their “fair share” of taxes. Tax laws were written by lawyers and accountants who mostly work for — you guessed it — rich people. Every time Congress closes a loophole, another one magically opens somewhere else.

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That’s why that $124 billion in tax revenue will begin to shrink almost immediately. The only significant revenue that will be realized from this legislation will be monies collected from those who can’t afford $300-an-hour attorneys or high-priced accountants.

If you’re making less than $75,000, perhaps you should set aside some cash to pay for a decent lawyer to make sure the IRS doesn’t bleed you dry. After all, does your kid really have to go to college?

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