It looks like no one’s watching these watchmen: Some 5% of the IRS workforce owe about $50 million in unpaid taxes.
Yes, you read that right.
About 6,000 of the same people cracking down on every mom-and-pop business because of home-office deductions (while pretending to be valiant warriors against delinquent billionaires) are cheating on their own taxes, big time.
Even more appalling than those mind-boggling figures, the vast majority of the IRS cheats don’t even have a plan in place to pay what they owe.
Is it possible to imagine a single private company whose employees practice fraud with such panache and pride? (Even at Theranos and FTX, it was the top guys playing fast and loose, not the rank and file.)
And all this happens, of course, with a big wink-wink from Big Brother.
Between October 2021 and April 2023, the IRS “disciplined” 139 employees who cheated on their taxes, but only 20 of them were fired.
That’s 14% — meaning the odds are very sunny that an IRS worker can cheat on his own taxes yet keep his job forcing others to pay up.
Must be nice, working as a “revenuer”: You put your hand in the little guy’s pocket all day, then go home at night, kick back with a brew and sit down to a long night of fraud and tax evasion.
And while this problem predates President Biden, it absolutely makes a mockery of his much-vaunted and very expensive initiative to recoup lost tax receipts by upping enforcement and hiring yet more goons: The prez should have started with cleaning his own house.
Worse still — apart from the quantifiable fiscal damage of that $50 million theft — ugly hypocrisies like this do incalculable damage to the rule of law.
That is: The law’s only for the little people when it comes to the federal government.
The IRS uses the vast power of the federal government, backed ultimately with arrest and imprisonment, to compel citizens to pay taxes.
For the personnel within this important but deeply unpopular agency to be seen breaking the same laws they’re tasked with enforcing shreds any sense the public may have that the feds are acting in good faith.
A zero-tolerance policy is the only way forward: You cheat, you’re out the door the same day. No payment plan, no second chance, nada.
But at this point even 迟丑补迟’蝉 unlikely to heal the public trust.
Recall that this news comes amid the wider context of Biden’s transformation of the government into a weapon against his own enemies and the American people: the FBI sicced on school-board dissidents, the bid to create a partisan speech-police force via a Disinformation Governance Board and on and on and on.
This really is a moment when democracy is under threat. When a government loses legitimacy, freedom goes next.
Funny how there’s no screaming Democrat ringing alarm bells on this one.
