OPINION:
One of the highest priorities for the incoming Trump administration should be to end the Democrats’ weaponization of powerful government agencies against taxpayers and businesses they don’t like. Nowhere has this mission been more pernicious than the party-line vote to fund the IRS with nearly $80 billion more and hire tens of thousands of new tax snoops.
By the way, according to the IRS press office, the added audits have raised less than $2 billion so far, far less than the increased expenditures. So how is this program paying for itself?
This was never about seeking tax fairness, as liberals argued. It was about unleashing an aggressive, permanent and unchecked enforcement assault on taxpayers to rake in more tax dollars to pay for their political agenda. Americans voted to end such madness, and the IRS should act accordingly and immediately by ignoring the Biden administration’s eleventh-hour efforts to ram through a slew of costly new rules and regulations as it heads toward the exit.
Progressive leaders made erroneous claims that a supersized IRS would raise nearly $1 trillion over 10 years from stepped-up enforcement against higher-income earners and businesses. They attempted to justify their proposals by broadly portraying entrepreneurs, small businesses, family-owned private enterprises and the wealthy as tax cheats. The entire exercise was designed to harass lawful taxpayers and threaten them as guilty parties until they could prove themselves innocent.
Fortunately, most voters saw their efforts for what they were: a liberal fantasy grab of other people’s money and an attempt to assert greater control over their livelihoods. Democratic leaders did not help themselves by immediately oversteering the car. This included efforts to have the IRS spy on personal bank accounts and require income reporting for Venmo payments among friends, as well as punitive measures on those whose incomes are derived from tips or other types of transactions.
Another target for IRS harassment has been business partnerships. Such businesses are one of the most common and practical ways to structure private enterprises of all sizes. A simple example might be when one party owns an available tractor and another has available land and they go into business together to farm the land. There are an estimated 4.5 million business partnerships in the United States. Collectively, these partnerships generate more than $12 trillion in revenue and employ millions of workers.
Yet the IRS is stealthily attempting to implement new rules before President-elect Donald Trump returns to office that threaten the future viability of such partnerships. These proposed changes to the tax code impact what is known as “basis shifting” — a routine and legal practice that business partners use to adjust the tax basis of their respective assets. In short, the proposed rules would deliberately embed uncertainty and subjective IRS interpretations of how taxable assets are treated when one transfers or sells their interest in a business partnership. This is the opposite of tax fairness.
Meanwhile, the multibillion-dollar bounty the Biden administration said its newly armed IRS would secure through added enforcement and new tax rules has failed to materialize. The IRS recently disclosed that just $1 billion had been recovered since its aggressive campaign went into effect two years ago, and there is no way of knowing if that would have occurred with or without it.
How ironic and sad is it for taxpayers to learn that the vast amount of the $80 billion Democrats awarded to the IRS to recover or find new “savings” is instead on pace to serve as a massive cost to the U.S. Treasury?
The last thing voters now want is for the IRS to impose costly last-minute tax changes that will worsen problems for taxpayers, workers and employers. Accordingly, the Biden administration and the IRS should put down their pencils. If they persist in these fourth-quarter rule changes, the incoming Trump administration should be prepared to immediately repeal them in January.
• Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
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