IRS could lose another $20B in funding Published December 23, 2024
WESTMINSTER, December 23, 2024 (Michael Cohn, AccountingToday.com) – The Treasury Department is warning Congress that it needs lawmakers to unlock $20 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service that could be rescinded due to duplicative legislative language.
The $20 billion is targeted at IRS enforcement and is separate from the more than $20 billion that has already been clawed back from the Inflation Reduction Act’s extra $80 billion in funding for the IRS over a decade. If Congress doesn’t fix the error in a continuing resolution to keep the government open, or in an omnibus spending package, during the lame-duck session before the end of President Biden’s term, the $20 billion may be rescinded, putting at risk the IRS’s ability to hire more employees and carry out its duties next tax season.
“The IRS is going to potentially have to make dramatic decisions about stopping hiring and starting to budget for a world [in] which they don’t have $20 billion, which will stop a lot of their progress,” Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo said during a call with reporters Tuesday, according to the Associated Press. “If they don’t get that $20 billion that is at risk, they would run out of enforcement money at the current pace sometime in fiscal year 2025.”
The IRS received an extra $80 billion in funding over 10 years for enforcement, taxpayer service and technology upgrades as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. But as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling in 2023, the funding was reduced by $1.4 billion, and later as part of another agreement last year an additional $20 billion of the tax enforcement money was distributed to other federal agencies for nondefense spending.
That $20 billion cut was mistakenly duplicated in the legislative language of a separate stopgap funding bill that passed in September, so the IRS faces another steep budget cut unless Congress acts to amend the language during its year-end appropriations process.
The budget cuts could also exacerbate the deficit as the extra money for tax enforcement was expected to generate tax revenue. The Treasury estimated the national debt could grow by $140 billion without the extra funding for tax enforcement.
Targeting Direct File
The incoming Trump administration is already expected to slash IRS enforcement funding. Republican lawmakers have been calling for cuts in the IRS budget, including the elimination of the Direct File free tax preparation program that the IRS began pilot testing last year in a dozen states. Last month, the Treasury announced that it’s planning to expand the Direct File program next year to 24 states, double the number that were pilot testing it last tax season.
Despite opposition among many Republicans in Congress to the Direct File program, Direct File may have the support of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has been assigned by President Trump to head a new Department of Government Efficiency with former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy with the goal of cutting waste and inefficiency in the federal government. On the recently created X account for DOGE, they posted last week about the need to simplify the tax-filing process, leading to a temporary drop in stock prices for Intuit and H&R Block.
“In 1955, there were less than 1.5 million words in the U.S. Tax Code,” said the DOGE account. “Today, there are more than 16 million words. Because of this complexity, Americans collectively spend 6.5 billion hours preparing and filing their taxes each year. This must be simplified.”
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the Trump administration will preserve the IRS Direct File program after next tax season.
“I would anticipate that it goes forward this coming year, in other words, for the 2024 filing season,” said former Intuit CEO Bill Harris, who developed TurboTax when he was president of ChipSoft, which Intuit acquired in 1993. “I’m sure it’s already all baked. The following year, it could just go away. I would bet more that it just withers on the vine. But I think that’s too bad too because one of the things that the IRS really needs to do is take a customer-focused view.”
He acknowledged, however, that Intuit and other tax software companies have been fighting to end the Direct File program.
“Some people, for instance, at the tax preparation software companies, are against it because they perceive it to be competition,” said Harris, who is now founding CEO of Evergreen Money, a development-stage financial services company. “I really don’t think that that’s the proper view. I think the proper view is that for the kinds of simple returns that they’re capable of handling, I think that’s great, and people should have a free mechanism to do that. And it’s also clear that the government will never be in a position to build something that’s terribly sophisticated. And so even for people with moderately complex taxes, they’re going to need something like professionally and privately built tax software. I see this as an opportunity for an excellent private-public partnership, so I hope the IRS continues with it, and I hope that the private companies embrace it.”
After leaving Intuit in 1999, Harris was co-founding CEO of PayPal, which merged Elon Musk’s X.com with Peter Thiel’s Confinity. Accounting Today asked Harris what he thought of the prospects for Musk’s DOGE to find enough savings from cutting government waste to make up for the lost tax revenue from the extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the various tax exemptions proposed by Trump on tip income, overtime pay, Social Security benefits and more.
“Nothing to do with Elon Musk, although I know he’s obviously going to be a part of this, but absent any personalities, it’s remarkably hard even for a Republican administration to rein in costs,” Harris replied. “Certainly the initial Trump administration did not do that. They expanded expenditures. There was a big runup in the debt, particularly as the party has moved from traditional Republican notions of fiscal conservatism to essentially populism.”
Musk posted Wednesday on X polling his followers about whether the IRS budget should be “deleted” in response to the $20 billion mix-up. “The IRS just said it wants $20B more money,” he wrote, asking if its budget should be increased, decreased, deleted or remain the same. Over 60% of respondents said it should be deleted.
Cutting the IRS enforcement budget could contribute to the national debt, as the Treasury Department warned, and could have a spillover effect leading to slowdowns in taxpayer service and technology improvements as well.
“You could see monies being taken away from enforcement, but probably continuing the customer service modernization portion of the IRS,” said Tax Guard CEO Hansen Rada. “The IRS requires a lot of people because the Tax Code is so complicated, and that’s really Congress’s fault. It’s not the IRS’s fault. It’s almost like yelling at the policeman when he pulls you over for speeding. If you want the speed limit raised, you go to your local representatives, you don’t yell at the policemen, and the IRS is just the enforcement arm. Barring any sort of drastic change to simplification of the code, it’s going to require people, because of deductions and all the other considerations in order to execute that. The vast majority of returns are simple returns, W-2’s, and so this Direct File, or this app that Elon hinted at would be a modernization effort to help the majority of returns, but not the complicated ones, and that still would require people.”
