What do you think of this description?

Major Duties:

• Adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially in maintaining honesty and integrity.

• Work a minimum of 50 hours per week, which may include irregular hours, and be on-call 24/7, including holidays and weekends.

• Maintain a level of fitness necessary to effectively respond to life-threatening situations on the job.

• Carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force (emphasis mine), if necessary.

• Be willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.

Reading the above work duties, it would be logical to conclude that the above would be part of a job application for the FBI, a SWAT team, the police, or even the CIA. 

But it's not. These are the duties that were posted days ago for new positions being recruited for by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). That's right, apparently the IRS thinks that it needs agents "willing to use deadly force" related to taxpayers who they believe aren't correctly filing their taxes.

I wish I was making this up, but the newly minted Inflation Continuation Act of 2022 Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provides for $80 billion in spending to add 87,000 new IRS agents, including the position listed above. That's more than double the current size of today's IRS, and it is more than 6.3 times more money than the current annual IRS budget of $12.6 billion.

The thinking is that if they spend $80 billion of taxpayer dollars to add 87,000 new IRS agents, it will generate more than $200 billion in new revenue for the government.

The common refrain that we've been hearing in the media recently is that "we need to make sure that the billionaires pay their fair share." But that's just the narrative. The reality is quite different.

The Joint Committee on Taxation reports that 78–90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Furthermore, only 4–9% will come from those making more than $500,000 a year.

This is scary. For anyone who has been through an audit, it's not pleasant. We're presumed guilty and are required to prove that we filed our taxes properly at our own expense. Reams of questions are asked of us, most of which are unnecessary and irrelevant.

The questions demonstrate that little to no effort was made by the agent to thoroughly research a case.

The current $80 billion plan to add 87,000 new IRS agents reminds me a bit of flawed shopping logic that makes me chuckle now and then. If someone goes out and buys something that they really don't need that costs $1,000 at a discount price of $700, did they really "save" $300? Nope. They spent $700 that they didn't need to spend.

The U.S. tax code is 6,871 pages long and incredibly complex. If we add in federal tax regulations and other tax guidance, it balloons even further to about 75,000 pages. Incomprehensible and absurd.

Here's a novel idea. Radically simplify the U.S. tax code and reduce the budget of the IRS by 80%, which would save U.S. taxpayers more than $100 billion over the next 10 years.

Aside from saving taxpayers an immense amount of money, there would also be a massive productivity boost.

Americans spend more than 8.9 billion hours a year doing their best to comply with the IRS tax code. This comes at an expense of more than $400 billion. I'm pretty sure we can find a more productive use for our time and our money to invest in productive activities.

Jeff Brown