Soon after the U.S. House reconvenes Monday to vote on the rules package containing many of the concessions House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made to secure to votes of far-right Republicans, the party is also expected to introduce what the new leader said early Saturday would be its “very first bill”: a proposal repealing new Internal Revenue Service funding meant to help audit the wealthiest Americans.
About $80 billion was included in the Inflation Reduction Act last year, with IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig saying the funding would only be used to increase audits of households making $400,000 per year or more.
“The resources in the reconciliation package will get us back to historical norms in areas of challenge for the agency—large corporate and global high-net-worth taxpayers,” Rettig wrote in a letter to the Senate in August.
The funding is supported by two-thirds of Americans, according to a 2021 University of Maryland poll, but McCarthy and his fellow Republicans have lambasted the Democrats’ effort to better equip the IRS to confront tax evasion by those with the highest incomes, falsely claiming President Joe Biden has provided the agency with an “army of 87,000 new IRS agents” who “will be coming for you—with 710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75,000.”
McCarthy’s plan to repeal the funding, said ACLU communications strategist Gillian Branstetter on Saturday, would actually “incentivize the agency to target poor people,” for whom audits are less expensive for the federal government because they lack the resources to engage in a legal battle with the IRS.