By David Cay Johnston -
CONGRESS will spend a trillion dollars more than it levies this year, so how do Washington's politicians respond to the 11th consecutive year of federal budgets in red ink? They plan to shrink the IRS.
Go figure. Cutting the IRS budget by more than 5 per cent in real terms makes as much sense as a hospital firing surgeons or a car dealer laying off salespeople when customers fill the showroom.
Shrinking the IRS makes sense if you believe government is too big and that cutting everywhere is the best way to shrink government. But this is the staff that generates revenue, and there is easy money to be made.
Congress should listen to the national taxpayer advocate, a position it generated to make sure taxpayers had a voice in how the IRS operates. In her annual report, released last week, advocate Nina Olson said Congress needed to "ensure that the IRS continues to be effective, either by reducing the IRS' workload or by providing adequate funding to enable it to accomplish its assigned mission."
Instead of cutting, we should be expanding the revenue-generating staff because there is plenty of tax money to be had, even in this awful economy.
IRS data show that auditors assigned to the 14,000 or so largest corporations found $9,354 of additional tax owed for every hour spent testing tax returns in the 2009 fiscal year. The highest-paid IRS auditors make $71 an hour. Based on a 2,080-hour work year, that works out to around $19 million of lost revenue annually for every senior corporate auditor position cut from the payroll.
It makes no economic sense to trim the ranks of auditors who generate more than a hundred times their annual salaries. Run a business that way and you go broke.
So why would President Barack Obama and Congress cut the IRS budget? Their actions illuminate the rise of corporate power and values, and the diminishing voice of Joe Sixpack, thanks partly to how we finance election campaigns. Then there is the growing army of corporate lobbyists and the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, which allows corporations (and unions) to spend all they can afford on influencing elections.
