(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) A new audit by the Treasury Department’s inspector general found that IRS employees and contractors owe a collective $50 million in back taxes, who happened to be the same people who are constantly counting every penny in the wallets of the American taxpayers.
The Daily Wire reported that, of the more than 3,800 IRS employees who owe back taxes, 2,000 have not even established a payment plan. Over 50 of the agency’s employees have remained for five years or more.
The news source discovered that nearly 150,000 federal employees failed to pay their taxes, which resulted in them owing $1.5 billion to the government.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R–Iowa, who requested the audit, said IRS employees’ failure to pay taxes is ironic since American taxpayers were forced to pay for the $80 billion the Inflation Reduction Act allotted to expand the agency’s audit capacity.
“Surely the irony and hypocrisy can’t be missed here: taxpayers are being forced to pay billions more to the IRS to audit America while the agency won’t even collect the tens of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes owed by its employees,” she said.
After reviewing 1,068 cases where IRS management had initiated disciplinary action against employees for tax issues, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that management often went easy on them.
“76 employees were suspended. Most of these cases involved willful … cases resulting in the employee being suspended for less than 14 days,” the inspector general’s report stated.
It was also discovered that, even though the law says that all IRS employees who “willfully” engaged in tax misconduct should be terminated, only 20 out of 70 IRS employees who engaged in this behavior between October 2021 and April 2023 were fired.
“Although the law requires an employee who has either willfully not filed or willfully understated their taxes due to be removed, subject only to the IRS Commissioner’s mitigation, this disciplinary action is not always enforced,” the document said.
In its response to the audit, the agency didn’t repent, writing that “for certain offenses, including the willful failure to file a tax return and willful understatement of federal tax liability, IRS employees shall be terminated unless the IRS Commissioner decides to mitigate the penalty of termination… The Commissioner exercised this authority.”
