 Next Monday's Tax Day, everyone! Amen and past the ammo. Peter, I'm old enough to remember when it was, I think, 2022? Well, I think it was the summer of 2022, when Democrats in Congress gave the IRS 80 billion, with a B, dollars to hire allegedly 87,000 new enforcement officers and swore up and down that for sure, none of that would go towards auditing anyone except for the rich people. I think Janet Yellen used the word misinformation to talk about those of us who were at the time saying, that's not how it's gonna work. That's just a single lady who, you know, she works with, misinformation. No. No. No. Wow. Would you care, Mr. Suderman, to in between your just machine gun of puns, your machine puns, inform the class on how and why a new Inspector General report from the Treasury Department has exposed the Janet Yellen's of the world and her hand maidens in the MSM as being a bunch of dirty dog liars. Yeah. So you can call me Mr. Information. And I want to start with the $80 billion number because $80 billion is so much money. Let's just go back to where this money comes from. This is part of the Inflation Reduction Act. And the idea was that no one even thinks, even Biden at this point, like he's going around saying, yeah, it's not really about inflation, right? There's a great quote from him about a year afterwards. It's like, you know, the biggest chunk of this money, actually what it's really about, it's not about inflation. It doesn't have anything to do with inflation. It's about investing in clean energy. Well, it's also about investing in IRS revenue agents. Now, some of this has gotten blown out of proportion. There was some rumor that they were going to hire like 87,000 armed agents. That is not correct. But this money was intended to hire a whole bunch of additional revenue agents who were supposed to focus on enforcement. And the pitch was, we're going to catch rich tax cheats, millionaires and billionaires who are not paying enough on their taxes. And there's all of this money that is not being paid, the tax gap. And so what the idea was, the reason that this made it into the Inflation Reduction Act is that this was going to be a deficit reducer because there's so much unpaid tax money out there from really, really rich people. Well, the problem with really, really rich people is, first of all, they already pay a lot in taxes. Two, they have lawyers and other resources. And three, there's not actually all that many of them. But you know who there are a lot of? People who aren't that rich, people who make less than a million or really people who make less than $200,000 a year. And so the latest TICTA report shows that about two thirds, the majority of new audits that have come in the aftermath of this new spending have been targeting people who make less than $200,000 a year and 80% have been targeting people who make less than a million dollars a year. Now, if you make $200,000 or you make $800,000 or $900,000 a year, you are not exactly poor. But this is not the we're only going to target the super rich argument that the Biden administration consistently made. The other thing that you see in that report that's really kind of interesting is they're not meeting their hiring goals. And this is one of the things this is like a notable part of this is they're not able to actually find the people to go and do the enforcement here. And so who do you end up targeting when you don't have a whole bunch of new professionals? You end up targeting the easy people to get to, which are the middle class folks who you can just harass, who you can just spend a lot of time trying to pick up more money from. And this is this is a pattern. This is not a one off one year thing. If you go back to the previous year, I will just read you a headline from Liz Wolf that ran and reason.com in January of 2023. In 2022, the IRS went after the very poorest taxpayers. And there's just there's just a whole bunch of audits going after people, not even the $200,000 earners, but people who are making much less than that. And that is a consistent pattern here. Whenever you give the IRS more money and you promise that it's only going to that it's only going to result in audits of rich people, the middle class and the not even middle class end up getting hit pretty hard. You know, part of that is also the earned income tax credit. If you if you claim that this is a payment or a program which goes to lower income people by by design. And there's also an error rate of up to 30% in a given year where the, you know, where payments are going out to the wrong people and they're among the top people. If you claim the EITC, that's one of the biggest flags for an audit, which also doesn't mean agent showing up at your door, but it means you get a follow up question or set of questions. And in a weird way, that makes sense because that is one of the most misbegotten or misappropriated programs that's out there. And it's pretty popular. Catherine, as you hurdle towards middle age, what is your current biggest irritation at tax season? Oh, God. I mean, to be honest, it has nothing to do with middle age. It has nothing to do with the complexity of my taxes. It's just the baseline range, Matt. It's just the very, very simple taxation is theft range that blinds me whenever I try to sit down to do the taxes. But if I'm giving like a slightly less bonkers answer, I guess it's, you know, it's also this sense that like, I'm pretty smart and I'm pretty good at paperwork and I should be able to do this. And the gap between things I personally could actually do on my taxes and what needs to be done is so substantial that I have to pay someone else to do it. That's the real tax gap? It's the real tax. So I mean, this is, you know, in the plan to hire all of these new agents and in particular to hire agents who can, who either have the seniority or the private sector experience to process audits for wealthy people. Like the reason that the IRS can't hire these people is because that's a really, really hard job. And the reason it's really, really hard is because our tax code is so complex and also because the IRS is so backwards technologically. And I think that's a piece of this that it's like really easy to underestimate. In a lot of other industries right now, we are replacing expensive labor with technology. And that is impossible to do at the IRS because they are still trying to, you know, modernize their computer systems that are like microfilm based. And so it's the rage is the problem, Matt, but also I don't like it that it makes me feel stupid. That was a clip from the latest episode of the Reason Roundtable. To watch another clip, click here. To watch the whole episode, click here and make sure to subscribe to the Reason Roundtable. You'll be glad you did.