In 2022, the IRS Went After the Poorest Taxpayers
reason.com
reason.com
If you aren't flagrantly insulting them in your non-payment, or otherwise being a purposeful ass in your tax fraud, the IRS will largely just send you a bill, because they'd rather you do your normal life so you can make money to pay them.
People push this IRS boogieman angle because they are politically motivated to make people hate taxes, but I neglected to report an entire W2 once, ignored all their letters, and they never so much as gently threatened me. Stamps and letterhead is really cheap, and they have processes in place to get the money you owe them. They don't WANT to put you in jail, or even interact with you, they just want your tax dollars.
Yes. This is usually a fully automated, computer-generated correspondence known as a CP2000 letter or "Automated Under Reporter" (AUR). I think the article is deliberately being vague about what they call a "correspondence audit" so that people mistakenly think it includes AUR letters.
I ended up filing incorrectly, claiming several hundred extra dollars in returns that I (probably?) didn't actually earn. This really looks like someone fraudulently claiming a credit for extra money.
The IRS sent me an email and a letter basically saying "hey you filed this wrong, but we fixed it, your actual return amount is this much less". End of story. I got my returns as expected and nothing else happened.
Honestly the simplest experience I have ever had with any agency of any government.
People hate the IRS because they are a huge bureaucracy and because they did deliberately target people like them.
A goverment agency in charge of something crucial like taxes targeting citizens based on their political preferences? man, I am not from the US but that sounds utterly apalling for a democracy.
Under the Obama administration, the IRS used political keywords like "Occupy" and "Tea party" to make decisions about which groups to focus on, with limited resources. The IRS investigated both conservative and liberal political groups, with multiple investigations showing no evidence that the IRS sought to investigate more conservative groups than liberal, or of using the rules differently against conservative groups.
It's just another instance of conservatives arguing that fair treatment is oppression because they get caught by rules more. It's the same as how facebook and twitter had to kneecap their "Fake News" filters because it kept labeling conservative posts as fake news. Conservatives bitched about this claiming they are being targeted but nope, just falling afoul of the same rules.
Important to note that rules hitting one group more than others doesn't immediately signal the group is just bad actors. Consider poll screening tests from the jim crowe era. They consistently affected black people in worse ways, because it wasn't an honest and fair system, because it was designed to do so.
I have not been convinced that facebook and twitter were applying their rules unequally. If you interview Fake News barons, they tell you that they just make more money and have more success targeting conservatives, often claiming that liberals are more likely to point out their articles are low trust or "Fake news" or should be taken with a grain of salt.
No, they didn't. The IRS has no idea if a person is lefist, conservative, or anything in the middle.
There were multiple investigations into the IRS targeting political groups (not people!) applying for tax exempt status using keywords like "tea party." Those investigations found that groups across the political spectrum were targeted, not just conservative ones.
“In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes.”
Further in the article you’ll learn that conservative groups were targeted more than left leaning groups.
It's not like the IRS is "going after" poor people who are trying to evade paying their taxes; they are trying their best to carry out the Congressional mandate to administer a welfare system via the tax collection process while countering the massive fraud that such easy handouts attracts.
"a baffling twist of logic, the intense IRS focus on Humphreys County is actually because so many of its taxpayers are poor. More than half of the county’s taxpayers claim the earned income tax credit, a program designed to help boost low-income workers out of poverty. As we reported last year, the IRS audits EITC recipients at higher rates than all but the richest Americans, a response to pressure from congressional Republicans to root out incorrect payments of the credit."