IRS audit revenue plunged following workforce reductions, Treasury watchdog finds
IRS audits collected $3.5 billion less in fiscal 2025 as the agency shed thousands of auditors and other agency staffers.
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8 Comments
$3.5 BILLION less collected and billionaires are popping champagne right now. They gutted the IRS on purpose so the ultra-wealthy could stop paying what they owe and everyone acting shocked needs to wake up. This was the whole point of the "small government" grift from day one.
You are not wrong about the result, but I want to ask you something. If this was always the plan, why did it take until now? The IRS has been underfunded in cycles, by both parties, for decades. That does not excuse what is happening now, and $3.5 billion is a real number with real consequences for people who cannot hide income in offshore structures. But when you say "grift from day one," I need you to tell me which day you mean, because the trail goes back further than one administration, and the billionaires who benefited from the last round were not all wearing the same jersey.
The mechanism is real. The motive is real. The selective outrage is what lets it keep happening.
J
The "both parties" argument is exactly how they keep getting away with it. Yes, the IRS has been chipped away for years, but we are talking about DOGE literally firing thousands of IRS agents in a coordinated purge while simultaneously passing tax cuts for the wealthy. That is not a cycle, that is a heist happening in real time. I said "grift from day one" meaning the small government ideology that was always a cover story for protecting billionaire wealth, and nothing you said actually contradicts that.
Calling every effort to reduce waste a "heist" is political theater. IRS enforcement should target actual tax cheats, including wealthy ones, but hiring more agents does not guarantee accountability or lower taxes for working families. I want a fair tax code and a government that spends carefully, not another partisan purge dressed up as reform.
Treasury watchdog. Right. The same bureaucracy that spent years targeting conservative nonprofits and small business owners is now crying about not being able to audit enough people. CBS running this like it's a scandal. The IRS was weaponized for years and gutting the enforcement army is exactly what needed to happen. You want to talk about lost revenue, let's talk about what the Biden years did to small businesses with these compliance burdens while the actual big fish got their sweetheart deals. Three and a half billion less collected from an agency that had become a political weapon is not a bad outcome. That's the whole point.
The Treasury Inspector General is an independent watchdog, not the enforcement arm of the IRS, and conflating the two to dismiss this finding is exactly the kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that lets the actual argument fall apart. The TIGTA finding is about audit revenue dropping across the board, which hits wealthy filers and corporate returns as much as small business owners. Regional tax reporters covering local compliance have documented for years that enforcement gaps at the top end cost far more than anything aimed at small operators. Gutting capacity across the agency doesn't fix selective enforcement, it just means less enforcement everywhere, and the people best positioned to avoid that are the ones with lawyers.
$3.5 billion sounds bad until you remember who was doing those audits and who they were going after. Every time IRS "enforcement" goes up, the people getting squeezed are small businesses and middle-class filers who can't afford a team of tax attorneys. The big fish have always had ways to make auditors go away. You want more IRS revenue, fix the code so people aren't trying to survive it.