This opinion piece originally appeared at Reuters.com.
Congress will spend a trillion dollars more than it levies this year, so how do Washington’s politicians respond to the 11th consecutive year of federal budgets in red ink? They plan to shrink the IRS.
Go figure. Cutting the IRS budget by more than 5 percent in real terms makes as much sense as a hospital firing surgeons or a car dealer laying off salespeople when customers fill the showroom.
Shrinking the IRS makes sense if you believe government is too big and that cutting everywhere is the best way to shrink government. But this is the staff that generates revenue, and there is easy money to be made.
Congress should listen to the national taxpayer advocate, a position it created to make sure taxpayers had a voice in how the IRS operates. In her annual report, released last week, advocate Nina Olson said Congress needed to “ensure that the IRS continues to be effective, either by reducing the IRS’ workload or by providing adequate funding to enable it to accomplish its assigned mission.”
Instead of cutting, we should be expanding the revenue-generating staff because there is plenty of tax money to be had, even in this awful economy.
IRS data show that auditors assigned to the 14,000 or so largest corporations found $9,354 of additional tax owed for every hour spent testing tax returns in the 2009 fiscal year. The highest-paid IRS auditors make $71 an hour. Based on a 2,080-hour work year, that works out to around $19 million of lost revenue annually for every senior corporate auditor position cut from the payroll.
WHY CUT?
It makes no economic sense to trim the ranks of auditors who generate more than a hundred times their annual salaries. Run a business that way and you go broke.
So why would President Barack Obama and Congress cut the IRS budget? Their actions illuminate the rise of corporate power and values, and the diminishing voice of Joe Sixpack, thanks partly to how we finance election campaigns. Then there is the growing army of corporate lobbyists and the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which allows corporations (and unions) to spend all they can afford on influencing elections.
Keep in mind the IRS costs just a half penny for each dollar of tax collected. Its proposed $11.8 billion budget would be less than the Agriculture Department spends each month.
If the IRS budget is cut, the losers will be workers and ordinary investors, who will find it harder to get their questions answered and their problems resolved by the agency. On the whole, these people do not cheat on their taxes because their incomes are easily checked — through reports by employers, mortgage banks and others. Under a law taking effect in stages between last year and next, brokerages must report the cost basis of securities. This change will reduce capital gains cheating.
TAX CHEATS
The winners will be tax cheats among sole proprietors and other business owners, who are subject to less verification. The latest IRS tax gap report, issued Jan. 6, estimates that just one percent of wages escapes tax, while 56 percent of “amounts subject to little or no” verification do so.
America’s biggest corporations, those with more than $250 million in assets, also may escape some tax if the IRS budget is cut. These nearly 14,000 companies pay about 86 percent of corporate income taxes.
Audits of these big firms were down even without a budget cut. And audits have become far more complicated, partly because Congress changed the tax code more than once a day on average from 2001 through 2010, Olson reported.
From 2005 to 2009, hours spent auditing the biggest corporations declined by 33 percent, according to IRS records analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University in New York.
Two decades ago, when the economy was a third smaller, the IRS staff numbered about 118,000. Now it numbers 95,000 and is on the way to about 90,000. The likelihood of a big company being audited has plummeted 50 percentage points from 72 percent in 1990 to 22 percent in 2010.
Big company audits are now limited to specific issues known to the companies in advance, not unlike when cops tip off owners of favored gambling dens before a raid. Each audit also begins with an “estimated time to completion.” Working auditors tell me this is really a hard deadline that allows companies to run out the clock with delays in producing documents.
Some IRS tax detectives privately ridicule this system, calling it “audit lite.”
Whether you like the corporate income tax or think it is an abomination, failing to enforce it with the same rigor as taxes on wage earners and most investors is indefensible on economic, budget deficit and moral grounds.
IRS budget cuts worsen budget deficits and send a corrosive signal that only chumps file honest tax returns. So you have a choice. Do nothing and suffer the consequences or call your congressman, senators and the White House — today — and then vote in politicians who support, rather than undermine, tax law enforcement.
