President Joe Biden’s proposal for a radical expansion of IRS monitoring of Americans’ bank accounts would be stopped in its tracks under a proposal introduced by two Senate Republicans concerned about protecting privacy rights.
“What they’ve done is, they are weaponizing the IRS, they’re pushing many, many billions of dollars into that and they will be hiring tens of thousands of new agents,” Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) told The Epoch Times late on Sept. 23.
“So this is all about looking at everybody’s transactions and then hoping that perhaps they find something that’s not getting reported so they can come after you and get that income,” Boozman said.
The Biden proposal would drop the dollar threshold for transactions at which federal tax agents would be allowed to examine an individual’s private bank account to just $600 from the present $10,000.
Biden also wants to double the IRS workforce by adding 87,000 new government agents under the president’s “The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda.”
Biden and Democratic allies in Congress claim the actions are needed to close the “tax gap,” the difference between what current federal law requires to be collected by the government and how much actually goes into the Treasury.
Boozman said Biden’s unprecedented explosion of new federal spending is the major reason behind Biden’s push to double the size of the IRS and give it virtually unlimited power to monitor how much income Americans earn and where they spend it, Boozman said.
“They want this new authority to look at transactions of $600 or more rather than $10,000 or more because they have a $3.5 trillion, or some say up to a $5 trillion bill, depending on how you score it, so they desperately need pay-fors. This shows how desperate they are,” he said.
Boozman said the $10,000 threshold was approved decades ago to enable the IRS to assist federal law enforcement efforts against drug cartels, terrorist groups, and organized crime rings.
“Today, $600 is such a small amount of money. To put this in perspective, this law was passed several decades ago, and when they did this, $10,000, if you tied inflation to it, it would be $50,000 today,” Boozman said.
“What they’ve done is taking what perhaps was a good idea at the time and weaponizing it such that they can get into your bank account.”
The Biden proposal requires all financial institutions, including banks and savings & loans, to report to the IRS every time an individual or family has a transaction of at least $600, with a breakdown of how much of the transaction was in cash, whether any of it came from an account in a foreign country, and if it represented a transfer from another account.
The new reporting requirement, which would take effect in 2022, would apply to both private individual and commercial business accounts owned by a taxpayer. The secretary of the Treasury would also receive broad new regulatory authority that would likely result in further expansion of invasive IRS actions.
