IRS unmasked: Away from politics, America's tax agency has lots of warts, and ammunition

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Just the News

Aside from history of alleged abuses, tax agency struggles with customer service, data security and audit targeting.

 

The Internal Revenue Service has long been a political football. Democrats alleged that in the 1960s it was used by Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon to subvert civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists, while Republicans alleged a decade ago it wrongly targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups.

 

More recently, Democrats have argued the tax agency needs $80 billion in new enforcement to end tax cheating and ease budget deficits, while Republicans say the new spending signed by President Joe Biden will only create an army of 87,000 armed agents intent on wreaking havoc on the middle and working classes.

With so much emotion, scandal and political rhetoric, it's sometimes hard for everyday Americans to sort fact from fiction. So the team here at Just the News did a deep dive to put together a list of facts about the IRS that aren't in dispute, from whom it audits to why it buys ammunition and arms its agents.

Here's what we found:

The IRS has disproportionately audited poorer Americans in recent years.

That said, the IRS still has spent a good amount of money on arms and ammunition, about $4.5 million between 2015 and 2019, according to a study of federal weapons purchases by the nonpartisan Open the Books nonprofit watchdog.

That report found the tax agency had bought 4,600 weapons, including 3,282 pistols, 621 shotguns, 539 rifles, 15 fully automatic weapons and four revolvers. It also had a stockpile of about 5 million rounds of ammunition.

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Who Will Save Americans From A Weaponized IRS?

Our American republic did quite well for nearly a century without the IRS or its forerunner, the Office of the Commissioner of Revenue. Today, federal “revenooers” are the greatest threat to freedom in a country where liberty is already being lost at an alarming rate.

The IRS is more than a mere revenue collector for the federal government. It has often been used an instrument of intimidation, even terror, against political foes, and those who might not be so enthusiastic about paying income taxes, or simply have a financial hardship that limits their ability to pay.

Administrations all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt’s have used the IRS to target their opponents. Elliott Roosevelt, one of FDR’s sons, said his father “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”

And of course most of us recall the IRS sitting on and rejecting applications for tax-exempt status for groups that were trying to organize against the policies of Barack Obama, essentially barring their existence.