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A troubling new report (PDF) released by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) has revealed that the substantial budget cuts imposed on the IRS meant that it recovered $5 billion less in revenue from enforcement efforts in 2012 compared to 2011. That is, while law abiding citizens and businesses paid the taxes that make up the bulk of our federal revenues, more non-payers, late-payers and under-payers are getting a pass because there aren’t enough IRS staffers to follow up with them.
This drop in revenue should come as no surprise given that the IRS’s annual budget was actually cut by some $329 million dollars from Fiscal Year 2010 to 2012. To absorb these cuts, the IRS was forced to get rid of 5,000 front-line enforcement workers – a 14 percent reduction of its enforcement personnel. Not so coincidentally, the TIGTA report notes that this 14 percent reduction in personnel correlates with the 13 percent reduction in revenue from enforcement over the past two years.
As we’ve noted before, cutting spending on the IRS budget is about the most counterproductive (and we’re being polite – other words are more fitting) ways to reduce the deficit because every one dollar invested in the IRS’s enforcement, modernization and management system saves the federal government as much as $200 in the long run. So that loss of $5 billion in tax revenue in the TIGTA report amounts to this: every dollar the government cut under the guise of savings actually increases the deficit by $15. How’s that for bad math?
Rather than reversing the budget cuts to the IRS in Fiscal Year 2013, Congress allowed the sequester to cut an additional $600 million from the agency’s budget. Looking ahead to Fiscal Year 2014, House Republicans are pushing to carve an additional $3 billion from the IRS, which would represent a cut of almost 25 percent of its entire budget.
Meanwhile, some of those pushing for these cuts view them as somehow a way to fix the IRS after the recent (trumped up) scandal over the process of granting tax exempt status to certain political groups. The reality that these anti-tax conservatives seem to be missing is that that the lack of resources at the agency was one of the main causes of the administrative issues surrounding the scandal, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate (PDF). In other words, cutting the IRS’s budget further will almost certainly generate more problems within the agency, not fewer.
Considering that the $50 billion recovered through enforcement in 2012 is only a fraction of the estimated $450 billion total tax gap, Congress should not only restore the funding lost to years of budget cuts, but significantly increase funding to help us reduce the deficit and pay for critical government investments.