Well you got that right. Anyone who thinks that taking money away from the underfunded IRS is a good way to save money, has absolutely no brains whatsoever. The Office of Budget Management estimates that cutting funding to the IRS will cost taxpayers $90 billion dollars in lost revenues.
Republicans are desperate to keep the IRS from going after rich tax cheats, like Donald Trump. They've been cutting funding to the IRS for more than a decade starting under Sequestration. The IRS has cut staff, even as the numbers of tax returns have nearly doubled in the past decade.
Americans have been steadily complaining about slow service and problems dealing with the IRS. Their ability to audit complex tax returns has steadily declined as a result.
At this point, the IRS is so underfunded that 93,000 IRS employees are processing 262.8 million tax returns, both personal and corporate. That works out to around 2800 tax returns per employee. There are 260 work days per year. This works out to more than 1000 returns, per IRS employee, per day. And it assumes that all IRS employees are doing nothing but processing returns. No secretaries, no follow up, no enforcement.
IR-2023-82, April 14, 2023 āThe IRS today issued its annual Data Book detailing the agencyās activities during fiscal year 2022 (Oct. 1, 2021 ā Sept. 30, 2022), including revenue collected and tax returns processed.
www.irs.gov
The IRS is losing billions of dollars every year to tax cheats and dead beats because they don't have the staff to audit rich people's returns or to collect unpaid balances. And the general public is screaming about the crappy service.
If the IRS starts doing proper audits and enforcement, the newly allocated funds will recovered hundreds of billions of dollars owed without raising anyone's taxes at all, so of course Republicans want to terminate a program which will catch rich crooks like Trump and his buddies.
The Trump Corporation was recently convicted in New York of criminal tax evasion, and their CFO is currently serving out his sentence. Of course Trump wants any government agency holding the rich accountable, to be seriously hampered in their efforts.