The IRS Is Taking Your Calls. So Much for that MAGA Lie About ‘An Army of 87,000 agents.’

By DICK POLMAN

Well, well, well. What do we have here: nn“During the opening stretch of tax season, the Internal Revenue Service is answering nearly 90% of taxpayers’ phone calls, a dramatic improvement that officials say is linked to an agency-funding boost included in the landmark Inflation Reduction Act.

“The IRS answered 88.6% of its phone calls, a Treasury Department official told the Washington Post on Feb. 10, up from the 13% of calls answered during the 2022 tax season and 11% the year before. Factoring in callers who reached automated phone and chat support, 93.3% of taxpayers were able to reach IRS resources since the start of tax filing season Jan. 23, through Feb. 4 …

“(The new federal law) provided the IRS $80 billion over 10 years to improve taxpayer services and tax enforcement for high income earners and corporations. The tax agency hired 5,000 workers to staff the phones based on funding from that law …

The IRS recently introduced new tools to allow taxpayers to electronically check the status of their amended returns and file non-wage earnings, such as money from gig work.”

Indeed, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo recently told, “These improvements showcase how we are modernizing both technology and customer service to bring the IRS into the 21st century and how the IRS plans to deploy (the Inflation Reduction Act’s) resources in the years to come.”

Hang on a sec … Haven’t the House Republican MAGAts spent the new year relentlessly warning us that Joe Biden’s feds were pumping $80 billion to the IRS in order to create “an army of 87,000 IRS agents,” many of them “armed,” for the express purpose of harassing hard-working Americans? Haven’t I seen umpteen tweets declaring that this agent “army” would be marching our way?

Gee, what a shock to learn that this was all just another viral MAGA lie.

Actually, this lie was obvious from the get-go. Most of the new federal bucks were earmarked for customer service staffing and new technology; less than 1% of the new hires would be actual agents. As I wrote a month ago, “The new money for tech support is crucial, because the IRS is still using technology from the 1960s to process individual tax returns. The new money for customer service is crucial because right now there’s a massive backlog of unanswered citizen inquiries. As John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner, recently told Time magazine, ‘The people who are significantly disadvantaged are average taxpayers who have a simple question and can’t get through. Those are Republicans as well as independents and Democrats.’”

It’s simple, really. The goal is to make government work better for the average citizen, regardless of partisan affiliation. That’s an alien concept to MAGA propagandists, of course, because their first impulse is to burn everything down and fervently lie while doing it.

But now that the IRS is boosting its customer services for red and blue Americans alike, doing precisely what the new federal money was intended for, rest assured that the “army of 87,000 agents” agitprop will be replaced by another MAGA fear-fantasy. Drag queens are not on the march and our gas stoves have not been seized, but hey, you never know.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2023

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