The Internal Revenue Service is still using technology and procedures from the 1970s to process tax returns. It had a backlog of 10.2 million unprocessed returns in July, largely because millions of people still use paper returns and they don’t have the technology to digitize them quickly. IRS employees have to manually enter the information from paper returns, one number at a time. They are using equipment so out of date that they have to fabricate their own replacement parts because the company that provided the originals is long out of business. The newest technology they’re working with, at least in one process facility, is a PC running on Windows XP, dating back to 2001. One-third of its staff is eligible for retirement, and it’s lost 20% of its staffing since 2010.
That’s why the IRS needs the $80 billion coming to it from the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Joe Biden Aug. 16—so that it can join the 21st century. That, by the way, is a plus for ordinary Americans and particularly lower-income people who are more likely to file free paper returns and who are more likely to be counting on their refunds coming to them in a timely manner.
So when Republicans—the same Republicans responsible for slashing a quarter of the agency’s funding since 2010—attack the agency and tell job seekers to stay away from the new, high-paying jobs the law will create at the agency because they’ll be asked to kill their fellow citizens in the job, it should be up to the traditional media to provide all that context. Predictably, the traditional media fails.
NBC News reports that an open letter from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the notorious Medicare fraudster, written to the American people, warns them away from IRS jobs because, he says, the agency insists hirees have to be “willing to kill” their neighbors and friends. NBC’s Sahil Kapur says that statement “mischaracterized” an IRS job posting. And that it “lacks basis in the text of the new law and has been dismissed by Democrats as a fabrication.”
It is a fabrication—and a dangerous one. It is inciting violence against IRS agents, just like we’ve seen against FBI agents since the search and seizure of stolen classified documents from Donald Trump’s Florida home.
An FBI field office has already been attacked, and the Homeland Security Department and FBI had to issue a joint intelligence bulletin to federal law enforcement warning of an increase in threats.
Scott and fellow Republicans are pouring gasoline on the fire, endangering some of the most beleaguered of all federal employees—the people of the IRS who have been having to hold the system together for years with “Scotch tape and string,” as one worker described it.
Republicans need to be condemned for these lies, not given the “both sides” treatment that gives the lies a gloss of legitimacy. What they’re doing is too dangerous and incendiary to be treated like a political game.
Joan McCarter is senior political writer for Daily Kos, where this appeared.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2022
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us