Don't Mess With Taxes

Photo by Kay Bell

My life has worked out pretty well, especially financially. I’ve come a long way from when I was in college, constantly keeping an eye on my income, which wasn’t much.

I remember times back in the day before minimum balances and monthly fees where my bank account balance was in double digits, and those numbers were after the decimal point.

That’s why I still obsess over how much cash I have on hand, and still use an old school check register even though I pay bills electronically. I like to see the income and payments written down, along with the math that tells me where I am, money-wise, on any given day.

That’s also probably why Ronald Marini’s item in his blog, The Tax Times, on the Internal Revenue Service current fiscal situation caught my eye. And thanks to Joe Kristan for bringing it to my attention in a recent Eide Bailly tax roundup.

Marini writes about a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) report that found The IRS Has Expended $6.9 Billion (11.9 percent) of its $57.8 Billion IRA Funding. That post is this weekend’s Saturday Shout Out.

Inflation Reduction Act IRS funds: The IRA to which Marini refers is the Inflation Reduction Act. (Quick aside, I really wish the White House had rethought this bill’s name and subsequent acronym, since most of us, in the tax community and beyond, still think retirement account when we see IRA.)

The Inflation Reduction Act originally gave the IRS $80 billion in additional funding. But the deal between President Joe Biden and Republican members of Congress back in March to keep the federal government open through the Sept. 30 end of the 2024 fiscal year rescinded $20.2 billion of the special IRA funding, and reallocated the money to other agencies.

Of that remaining money, Marini notes that it was intended to help the IRS transform tax administration and improve the services provided to taxpayers.

However, he points out that “the IRS estimates that $1.6 billion of IRA funding will be needed to cover its annual appropriation shortfalls for pay raises, inflationary increases already built into contracts, and other current services.”

And that means, “continued use of IRA funds to cover shortfalls in the annual appropriation will impact [the tax agency’s] ability to successfully deliver transformation objectives.”

I’ll let you read Marini’s full post as your leisure. And if you also want to peruse the source material, check out TIGTA’s report, “Quarterly Snapshot: The IRS’s Inflation Reduction Act Spending Through June 30, 2024.”

You also might find these items of interest:

• IRS collection from rich nonfilers exceeds $1.3 billion
• IRS’ latest moves enable more digital taxpayer interactions
• IRS Commissioner touts the tax agency's generational digital transformation

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