Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie posted a video to Twitter of the IRS training potential recruits, noting and urging Americans to note that the target of the training scenario is not a billionaire.
“Notice the scenario in this IRS recruiting program is ‘taking down a landscape business owner who failed to properly report how he paid for his vehicles,’ not ‘taking down a billionaire who uses the corporate jet for private trips,’” Massie posted.
The video showed potential IRS agents training in how to arrest someone suspected of tax evasion. The scenario shown in the video explained that the suspected offender was the owner of a landscaping business who allegedly bought vehicles with funds not reported as part of the business.
The video was posted by the Community Education Channel on YouTube on April 1, 2022. The IRS Adrian Project was at Utah Tech University, then called Dixie State University, to recruit potential IRS agents, according to a release.
President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law earlier this week that will provide the IRS with $80 billion to hire 87,000 new agents. Republicans and conservatives have been critical of the expansion, saying that the agents will target small businesses.
Democrats claim the new agents will not target anyone who makes under $400,000 per year, specifically claiming that the agents will be focused on pursuing billionaires. However, when Senate Republicans introduced an amendment to limit audits to those making over $400,000 per year, every Senate Democrat voted against it.
“They are targeting people that they keep telling us they think are – restaurants and barber shops and so on,” Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform told “America Reports” guest host Gillian Turner. “That’s their target, and we know this because every single Democrat in the Senate voted against, to defeat an amendment which said this law will not allow any increase in audits on people making less than $400,000 a year.”
“It’s a vast expansion of paperwork, and one of the challenges we have with the IRS, they have not earned people’s trust or respect,” Norquist said. “When tens of – thousands and thousands of people’s audits and their personal income over a ten-year period was released a year and a half ago, the IRS said we are on it, we’ll expose this, this will stop. They have exposed nothing. When the Senate has asked them, please tell us what’s happening, they say it’s a secret.”
“We saw this happen in the past, they go after conservatives who made contributions to political campaigns that the liberals did not like and then they get attacked publicly because their private contribution to, say, churches or other organizations get made public through the IRS workers, auditors, breaking the law and sharing it out to get them, and they are not firing people and they’re not disciplining people,” Norquist said.
The IRS received criticism for leaks of taxpayer data to ProPublica in 2013 and 2021 and also allegedly targeted Tea Party groups.
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