This year, Congress took an important first step toward rebuilding the agency. The Inflation Reduction Act provided a one-time cash infusion of $80 billion. Of that, $45 billion will go to increased enforcement to begin to close the gap between taxes owed and taxes collected — funding that will more than pay for itself. The remaining $35 billion will be used to revamp the agency's archaic technology, improve customer service and invest in changes that will restore the agency to basic functionality. The funds for long-term investments will remain available beyond the normal one-year cycle, so there is predictable funding for systems to be designed and implemented.
But Republican critics of the IRS claim that providing this basic funding will lead to menacing IRS agents "on every corner." That fiction suggests a willful ignorance of history. In the mid-1990s, the IRS employed 15,540 revenue agents to audit taxpayers. Today, that number is 8,200. GOP critics also claim that the IRS singles out conservatives for tougher scrutiny, but repeated independent reviews failed to find any evidence of political targeting within the agency...
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