Can the IRS be Saved?

Paragraph we never expected to read in the newspaper:

One 2020 candidate already has a bold proposal to resuscitate the I.R.S. It’s a plan to pump tens of billions into the agency, enough to fund a second army of agents. That candidate’s name is Donald Trump.

In political folklore Republicans are known for disliking federal taxes and fiercely disliking paying taxes, so the future of the president's budget proposal is anyone's guess.

Still, this op-ed by two Politico reporters reminds us that the IRS is an endangered bureaucracy, underfunded and understaffed. Notably lacking: hundreds of highly-trained auditors needed to go toe-to-toe with aggressive tax planners.

Will the IRS receive the many billions needed to restore the agency to fighting trim? Probably not, unless the president is tired of being the only high-income celebrity under constant audit.

Portrait of a Tax Audit

Printmaker Warrington Colescott died September 10 at the age of 97. according to his NY Times obituary. Known for his biting etchings, Colescott once experienced a tax audit. His painful descent into IRS hell prompted him to create "Inside IRS."

Dave Barry: The IRS Finally Reforms!

From Dave Barry's Review of the Year in The Washington Post:

In Washington scandal news, the Internal Revenue Service, responding to a subpoena, tells congressional investigators that it cannot produce 28 months of Lois Lerner’s e-mails because the hard drive they were stored on failed, and the hard drive was thrown away, and the backup tapes were erased, and no printed copies were saved — contrary to the IRS’s own record-keeping policy, which was eaten by the IRS’s dog. “It was just one crazy thing after another,” states the IRS, “and it got us to thinking: All these years we’ve been subjecting taxpayers to everything short of rectal probes if they can’t produce EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT WE WANT, and here we lose YEARS’ worth of official records! So from now on, if taxpayers tell us they lost something, or just plain forgot to make a tax payment, we’ll be like, ‘Hey, whatever! Stuff happens!’ Because who are we to judge?”

The Costly Decline of the IRS

Fiscal austerity has proved costly, Businessweek reports:

[B]udget cuts forced the IRS to trim 8,000 full-time workers from its rolls, 5,000 of whom were auditors. Those layoffs amounted to a 14 percent reduction in the agency’s enforcement staff, which caused the money that the IRS collects through audits to fall off by 13 percent.