By Adam Andrzejewski of RealClearInvestigations
Top line: Nearly 6,000 IRS employees and contractors owe $50 million in taxes, according to a federal audit released in July.
Key facts: Tax evaders account for 5% of the IRS workforce. About two-thirds still don’t have a proper tax plan.
Federal law requires the IRS to fire workers who knowingly fail to pay taxes, but auditors said “such disciplinary action is not always enforced.”
Between October 2021 and April 2023, the IRS disciplined 1,068 employees, including 139 who “knowingly” paid taxes incorrectly, but only 20 of them were fired. Others had their cases “mitigated” because they had been with the IRS for a long time or had high job performance ratings.
Seventy-six employees were suspended, with most suspensions lasting two weeks or less.
Auditors also found that the IRS rehired 397 employees and 115 contractors with previous conduct issues, including 282 workers with more than one conduct or performance issue. “Conduct issues” include unauthorized access to tax returns, sexual assault and criminal behavior. 85 of them had previously encountered tax problems and 306 had “unacceptable” work performance.
background: A previous audit found that the federal government had 149,000 employees and had $1.5 billion in unpaid taxes in 2021.
Meanwhile, ordinary citizens continue to fund the IRS’s $4.9 billion payroll. The agency paid 11,846 people six-figure salaries in 2022, according to OpenTheBooks.com payroll records.
These include employees allegedly hired to help taxpayers. The annual salary of the IRS’s “Taxpayer Experience Officer” is $200,000, and the annual salary of the “National Taxpayer Advocate” is $203,000.
Search all federal, state and local government payroll and vendor expenses Benjamin, the artificial intelligence search robot, from OpenTheBooks.com.
Key quotes: “Thank you for your commitment to holding the IRS ‘accountable to taxpayers’ and ‘trying to rebuild trust in the IRS,'” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said in a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Wayfair wrote in. “Today is a great day to demonstrate the seriousness of that commitment by making thousands of IRS tax evaders pay up or pack their bags. When the IRS’s own auditors can’t even pass a tax audit Taxpayers never trust the IRS.
Senator Ernst spearheaded the congressional efforts to require the audit and lead to these disclosures.
Summary: It’s crazy to think that the nearly 6,000 employees of the tax agency – whose salaries are paid by hard-working taxpayers – are tax fraudsters!
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Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.
