The Internal Revenue Service headquarters building in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/TNS)
The ink is barely dry in the recently promulgated law reduction of inflation, allocating $ 80 billion for 10 years to modernize IRS technological systems and provide a more tax collection and collection effective. However, republican criticisms such as Senator John Thune from the southern Dakota complain that the necessary funds will hardly do to allow the IRS to "spend more time harassing taxpayers in this country".
Given between $ 500 billion and $ 1 billion a year of taxes, it does not apply, perhaps some United States and societies deserve to be a little harassed. Especially when it is considered that, when Middless's American wage workers have a reliability rate of 95% to pay their just part of the taxes, the higher 1% of the wealthy Americans do not constantly inform (and are very good to hide ) 20% of your income.
For years, Republicans and Democrats in Congress have blocked the resources they need to update their IT systems and avoid constant erosion of their application capacities. As Charles Rettig pointed out, a commissioner appointed by Trump and the IRS commissioner, the "DEMENTS OF DEI for the agency [are] large companies and high quality global taxpayers", not the Americans American Americans that senator Thune intends to protect.
The award in all of this could be the resumption of $ 400 to $ 800 billion in lost income for 10 years, a return of five to ten times what we would invest in modernizing the IRS.
Regardless of what these funds are used, by paying national debt, modernizing the decaying physical infrastructure of the United States or by providing better access to the crèche and education of community schools, in S 'ensuring that all American people and companies pay their fair the tax part is the right thing to do.
And this is something that we have done before, in much more difficult circumstances, and for the Republicans no less.
During the summer of 1862, with the effort of the war of the Union which unfolds badly, Abraham Lincoln appointed George S. Boutwell, former governor of Massachusetts (and distant cousin), to be the first Internal income commissioner. With only three employees and a small office in the Treasury building, Boutwell had to face the Herculean task of interpreting the recently approved income law which provided a wide range of rights on products and services and a tax ( progressive) on income from the first time in the first time in the history of the country. He also had to supervise the hiring of hundreds of Treasury employees in Washington and thousands of assessors and tax collectors in the North States.
.For the next eight months, working "without interruption of Saturdays or nights", "Boutwell managed to manage the collection of more than $ 2.3 billion in dollars today for the effort of the Union War . The meticulous Yankee which was, Boutwell was proud that few budgetary decisions of the office were revoked by the courts. He was also convinced that the Americans have completed the payment of their new taxes, noting that "the inhabitants of this country have accepted ... without serious complaint in their administration ".
Now, more than 160 years later, the internal tax service is, with many, the most defamed branch of the federal government. Having been hungry for the necessary resources, the IRS is denounced hypocritical both for its inability to carry out complex and complex audits of rich people and to provide basic telephone information to current taxpayers. What criticisms never mention is that the Americans would not benefit from all the ornaments of a modern society if it was not for the completely remarkable voluntary tax system which is a critical basis of our democracy.
Repairing damage to an IRS with budget cuts and failures to modernize its IT systems will not be easy. But it is necessary and must be a bipartite objective.
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