The IRS employs roughly 100,000 people. The total requested budget for 2014 including for Program Operations amounted to $13,358,007,000. And somehow they just can’t seem to make ends meet. No one feels sorry for them. The Commissioner for the IRS, John Koskinen refers to the IRS employees as ‘long-suffering’.
IRS Agents make about $82,000 on average, Customer Service Reps make about $44,000, and Special Agents about $120,000. Taking a look at what these ‘long suffering’ people are rewarded is making me nauseous:
1) 2/3 of cost of health insurance,
2) long term care insurance,
3) ‘the best retirement program in the world’, per their website, FERS, the employee contribution is currently set at .08% which amounts to roughly $65 on the annual average salary
4) life insurance,
5) on the job training,
6) reimbursement of college course expenses,
7) merit and job performance rewards (their website claims their employees are given more than any other government agency),
8) overtime pay AND premium pay for working more than 8 hours in a day,
9) 4 hours annual leave per pay period, which is every two weeks, adding to 2.6 weeks per year
10) 4 hours per pay period for sick leave = 2.6 weeks per year
11) 10 paid holidays,
12) the ability to telework from home,
13) free childcare
14) free counselling services
15) locality pay adjustments – for example if you live in Houston or LA, your base rate is adjusted up about 28%. There are over 30 different city areas that have bump up adjustments
To qualify as a grade GS-7, you need a bachelors degree with an overall gpa of 3.0 or higher. The overall average IRS employee salary is $83,000.
Between October 2010 and December 2012, the IRS paid more than $2.8 million to about 2,800 workers with ‘recent conduct issues’. A conduct issue includes willfull failure to pay taxes, unauthorized access to a taxpayers private information, abuse of agency leave policy, misuse of IRS property, falsification of official forms, and behavioral problems. None of these issues qualified the individual for firing, instead they were given bonuses. These are the ‘long-suffering’ employees the new Commissioner lauds. The bonuses included more than $1 million in cash awards for roughly 1,100 employees with federal tax-compliance problems.
But their budget and conduct woes do not end. Between 2010 and 2012, the IRS spent $50 million on conferences. And remember the illegal targeting scandal? The targeting occurred in 2010, was discovered in 2013, and the ‘investigation’ continues. No one has been sanctioned. No one fired. No fines. No fees. The FBI has concluded that there was no evidence that might require criminal charges being filed for the corruption. And like Hillary, the solution was to crash Lois Lerner’s hard drive, and wipe clean and scrap her phone. Case closed.
Because our government is inherently corrupt, we have another government agency whose task it is to investigate and squash fraud from within. This agency is called The Government Oversight and Reform Committee.
Now the IRS is facing more problems as it confesses to wasting millions of dollars on decorative items and blames the Republican party for these sprees given budget cuts have made their workload over taxing. One Senator even went so far as to state that the budget cuts never even hurt the IRS, they just hurt the American people. Really? And to make it better, they want more money. Specifically, they want $490. million just to enforce Obamacare penalties, and $122.8 to enhance greater collection of taxes.
SEIZURES: As of 2012, the amount of funds that the IRS had seized from individuals aggregated $3.2billion. The IRS may seize any property or cash from a taxpayer based on ‘suspicion’ of an illegal activity. Most taxpayers forfeit the money because getting an attorney to fight the IRS costs more than the value of the asset and can take upwards of 6+ years. One third of all the cases involved no criminal activity whatsoever. Contrary to normal US law, it is the citizen’s responsibility to prove innocence in order to get their property returned. The money and properties seized are available to the agency making the seizure without any appropriation by Congress. The IRS has stated that going forward it will curtail these sort of seizures and try not to target individuals where there is no suspicion of the money involved coming from an illegal source.
So where is the IRS spending such a huge chunk of its budget? According to the CATO Institute, there are two main categories of IRS functioning; handouts, which include tax credits including Obamacare subsidies, and administration which is the basic functioning – tax return processing, help, enforcement and other. Of the two categories, administration costs have remained relatively unchanged, while handling of credits has jumped more than 400% since 2000.
It would appear that the IRS is scrambling for more money in order to be the caretaker of Obamacare which is seriously cutting into the benefit package for their ‘long-suffering’ employees. Are you feeling sorry for them yet?