Trump says that IRS audits unfairly target low- and middle-income households and therefore he plans to eliminate over 75% of the IRS’s funding for audits.  Consider the following facts and make up your own mind as to who Trump is really supporting and who benefits the most from eliminating IRS audits.

 

1)  In 2017, at the beginning of Trump’s first term, the likelihood of a household with income over $1 million being audited was twice that of a household with income under $60,000.

 

2)  At the end of 2020 (the end of Trump’s first term and due largely to his cutting IRS funding), the likelihood of a household with income over $1 million being audited had been reduced to half that of a household with under $60,000 in income.  That is, you were twice as likely to be audited if you made under $60,000 than if you made over $1,000,000.

 

3)  In 2023, aided by additional funding from the Biden administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS was able to recover more than $1.3 billion (that’s “billion” with a “b”) delinquent tax dollars from people who had over $1 million in income and/or who owed more than $250,000 in tax debt.

 

4)  The IRS estimates that over the last decade the underreporting of income on individual tax returns accounted for roughly $300 billion in unpaid taxes.  More than half of this total is associated with taxpayers in the top 10 percent of income levels.

 

5)  IRS audits recover more in unpaid taxes than they spend to conduct.  While the average “pay-back” for every dollar spent auditing low-income households is roughly break-even, the payback from the top 10% of earners is more than $12 for every dollar spent.

 

6)  Trump/Republican efforts to cut IRS funding would widen the deficit they claim to care about.  The Congressional Budget Office reported that these cuts would increase the national debt by $186 billion over the next decade by reducing the IRS’s ability to recover revenue from wealthy tax cheats – their words, not mine.

 

So, the question remains, “Who do you think benefits the most from eliminating IRS audits?”

 

I believe that if Trump were the “great businessman” that he says he is, and actually cared as much about the “average Joe” as he claims he does, he would eliminate audits on low- and middle-income levels and increase IRS audit funding focused on the top 10-25% in income.  Unfortunately, his past actions show that he prefers to throw the average taxpayer a bone and enable his ultra wealthy friends to pocket millions.

 

Scott Brown lives in Sunriver.