A Biden administration proposal to hand Americans’ bank access over to the Internal Revenue Service is “absolutely ridiculous” and a “gross invasion of privacy.” said Rep. Kustoff, R-Tenn.
Biden’s plan in part is to propose higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, to help pay for his highly unrealistic and ambitious $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan. Aside from taxing the rich, he wants the IRS to crack down on collecting the taxes that are already owed.
This is where his plans get fishy… Biden proposed giving the IRS more information about the money moving in and out of people’s bank accounts, which has received a lot of protest from Republican Congressman.
REP. KUSTOFF: “So, Maria, Janet Yellen testified in our committee, the Financial Services Committee, last week, and I asked her about it because what their plan is is exactly what you said to essentially audit every single account where there’s a $600 transaction. They anticipate, I mean, the reason they’re doing it, number one is to increase the number of IRS agents and IRS audits. And they think that it would raise $460 billion in 10 years. Now, you know, you think about all the issues there, the gross invasion of privacy. I don’t know how the banks, especially smaller community banks, comply with that. To me, it’s a truly dumb idea. I tried to really press Janet Yellen on that. We’ll see if she got the message. But right now, that is still in the plan.”
Nebraska is the first state to swiftly decline this major invasion of privacy, refusing to comply with Biden’s terrible plan.
Thanks, but no banks! Nebraska becomes the first state to say they will NOT comply with Biden's 'IRS snooping plan' https://t.co/BKPwAEz2Y1
— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) September 30, 2021
“My message is really simple. The people of Nebraska entrusted me to protect the privacy of these accounts and I am not going to comply with this. If the Biden administration sues me, we will take it all the way to the Supreme Court. We are going to fight every step of the way,” state treasurer John Murante told FOX Business.
Scott Horsley of NPR touched on the main focus group that this plan affects.
“If you draw a regular paycheck in this country, it’s pretty hard to cheat on your taxes. The IRS knows to penny how much you make because it’s right there on your W-2. The IRS has much less information, though, about people who own businesses or rental properties or have other sources of income.”
There is a large grey area surrounding the tax gap within partnerships, businesses, and high-income individuals who have opaque sources of income the IRS isn’t privy to.
Treasure Secretary Janey Yellen has stressed that the government is not looking at the specific details about individual bank withdrawals or deposits, rather they want to focus on the totals.
But that does not discount these plans as a legitimate invasion of financial privacy.
Wyoming senator Cynthia Lummis is one of many who is pushing back against Biden’s Proposal. “People will literally find alternatives to traditional banks just to thwart IRS access to their personal information not because they’re trying to hide anything, but because they’re not willing to share everything.”
Not to mention, the federal government does not have a clean track record of keeping this type of data secure from leakage, nor do we know how the IRS plans to accomplish its goals of tracking and reporting unreported taxable income.
The IRS is known for information leaks; nonprofit news outlet ProPublica published a series of stories talking about wealthy people who managed to legally avoid taxes using a vast trove of IRS data. What’s more concerning here is the fact that this information was leaked in the first place…
This leaked information only poses more of a challenge for the dems vying to give the IRS more tools; it’s clear as day that giving the federal government more access to financial data only spells bad news.
“IRS building” is copyright © 2010 David Boeke and made available under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)
