The longstanding efforts of Republicans in Congress to hamstring the Internal Revenue Service’s auditing capacity through budget cuts is misguided.
It adds to the deficits that the GOP claims to be so concerned about by limiting the ability of the IRS to catch tax cheats.
The IRS, atypically for a government agency, produces not only more revenue than it spends but way more revenue than it spends. For every dollar that is appropriated to the IRS to hire new agents and conduct more audits, roughly two and a half dollars are returned in additional tax collections.
That said, the IRS is wise to end its decades-old policy of making unannounced home and business visits. Although it is losing the element of surprise by dropping the policy, such unannounced visits have hurt the IRS’ image, making it even more feared and less popular, and feeding into the GOP narrative that the agency needed reining in.
These visits have also been potentially dangerous for IRS employees.
Given the prevalence of firearms in this nation and the growing number of incidents in which people have shot first at strangers on their property and asked questions later, it can be risky for any person to show up without warning at someone’s door. The conspiracy-fueled paranoia toward the IRS in some quarters only adds to the risk.
Besides, when it comes to auditing a filer’s taxes, so much of the cheating presumably can be discovered these days through sophisticated electronic means. If an IRS agent needs to follow that up with a face-to-face meeting, scheduling it ahead of time should not have much bearing on the results.
In fact, it might be better for all parties — and certainly for the safety of the IRS employee — to have these face-to-face meetings occur at a government office rather than in a person’s home or business anyway.
