Congressman Kelly was a car dealer in Butler, Pennsylvania who was elected to Congress in 2011. He serves on the House Ways and Means Committee and is the top Republican on the Ways and Means’ Oversight Subcommittee. As a businessman, Congressman Kelly knows about the problems businesses and people have dealing with the IRS. In 2019, Kelly and the late Congressman John Lewis co-wrote and helped push through the Taxpayer First Act (TPA). Kelly explained that the 2019 bill was aimed at making the IRS “a resource rather than an adversary.”
Here are some of the key provisions:
- Directs the IRS to develop and submit to Congress a “comprehensive customer service strategy” within one year that beefs up employee training and considers best practices from the private sector. The agency also must establish benchmarks for measuring the success of the new strategy.
- Establishes an independent office of appeals within the IRS aimed at ensuring that, in general, all taxpayers have access to the administrative review process regarding tax disputes. It also gives taxpayers access to their case files prior to the start of any dispute resolution process.
- Allows taxpayers to request a six-digit identity protection PIN that will be used in place of the Social Security Number.
- Sets one point of contact for taxpayers who are victims of ID theft to coordinate their cases. Taxpayers “will not have to reiterate the entire course of their case at the start of every new conversation with a different agent or IRS employee,” according to Mr. Lewis’ office.
- Requires that guidelines be developed for ID theft refund fraud cases. The guidelines may include cutting the amount of time that tax return fraud victims wait to receive their refunds and setting a time frame for resolving issues related to the case.
- Prevents debt collection cases involving low-income individuals from being referred to private debt collection companies. The IRS has been using private companies to go after some bad debts in recent years, but Congress doesn’t want low-income taxpayers entering into payment agreements that they can’t afford with private companies.
Congressman Kelly and Additional IRS Funding Leading to More Collections
Congressman Kelly is one of the most vocal critics of the proposal to increase the IRS budget by 70%. The people promoting this funding argue that “it would result in collecting more than $70 billion a year from the $1 trillion in taxes that’s currently being evaded.”
Congressman Kelly and ProPublica Leaks
In June, ProPublica obtained leaked IRS tax returns and published a story that showed that some of the richest people in America paid little to nothing in federal income taxes.
That leak infuriated Mr. Kelly. He called it an “outrageous criminal act” to aid a “left-wing propaganda outlet ... in pursuit of a political narrative on tax policy.”
“This is an astonishing breach of trust that should cause every American to wonder if his or her tax records could be weaponized against them.”
“But how can an agency that takes years to process tax returns, leaks private financial records to damage certain taxpayers and wields its vast power to punish people or organizations with certain political or religious views be seen as anything other than an adversary?”
CONCLUSION
Congressmen Kelly and Lewis made a sincere and good faith effort to make the IRS less adversarial. But like punching the bag in the picture, the IRS always returns to what it really is—a dysfunctional agency trying to do an impossible job of administering the corrupt and broken federal income tax system and doing it badly.
There is a famous statement that you can’t change a pig by putting lipstick on it—it is still a pig. You can apply as much lipstick as you want, but the pig stays the same. Attempts to “fix” the IRS are doomed to fail.
The rapidly growing escalation in federal income tax evasion clearly demonstrates that the income tax system has lost the respect of the American people. There is even more truth to the statement, “There are two kinds of people who don’t like the income tax—Men and Women!”
It is time to pull the plug on the life support system that is keeping the IRS and the income tax system alive.
If you want to prevent the IRS from being further weaponized to punish those of us who may object to the D.C. opinions and dictates of what is good for us, then help us PASS THE FAIRTAX!
The IRS will be gone and we will pay our taxes when we make purchases. WE and not D.C. Elites will decide how much federal tax we pay!
If you have friends who don’t know about the FAIRtax, send them to FAIRtax.org. Have them watch the white boards under “How It Works” and, if they agree, ask them to please join us.
Then contact your Members of Congress and the President and demand that Congress pass -the FAIRtax—the only fair tax.
Remember, if we don't continue to tell the truth and demand a change, then this quote from George Orwell's 1984 may foretell our children's future:
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
Is it hopeless? When confronted with a seemingly impossible problem, remember the statement attributed to the author George Bernard Shaw who wrote, You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”
Isn’t it time for us to ask, “Why not?”