No one likes tax time, but one fresh character might offer at least some entertainment.
Former congressman Billy Long of Missouri, who famously deployed his skills as a professional auctioneer on the House floor during a debate, is President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Internal Revenue Service after its acting director Melanie Krause’s resignation over the administration’s effort to use tax information to identify people in the country illegally.
On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers take a post-tax filing deadline look at the history of the IRS being used to go after political opponents.
Most recently, the Joe Biden administration sicced the IRS on journalist Matt Taibbi. After Taibbi testified about the Hunter Biden laptop in front of Congress, IRS investigators showed up at his door and hauled away several boxes of seized material. Taibbi has said it was done purely to intimidate him, and the boxes were returned a month later without being unsealed.
Franklin Roosevelt deployed the IRS against his nemesis, steel magnate Andrew Mellon in the 1930s. Richard Nixon turned the IRS loose on his political opponents in the 1970s. President Bill Clinton’s two sexual harassment accusers, Juanita Broadrick and Paula Jones, were both somehow targeted by IRS investigators for audits during the Clinton administration. Famously, Barack Obama used the IRS along with a bureaucrat named Lois Lerner to punish “Tea Party” organizations by denying their applications for tax-exempt status while granting it for left-wing dark-money groups in 2012 and 2013.
One of Lerner’s former top deputies, Holly Paz, is still there at the IRS and running one of its most important divisions — the Large Business and International Division. As Schweizer explains, this unit scrutinizes the tax returns of the roughly 100,000 businesses with assets worth more than $10 million.
Back in 2013 and working under Lerner, Paz participated in an internal IRS investigation relating to the agency’s discrimination against tea-party groups. She got in trouble for neglecting to mention that fact when testifying before Congress about the scheme. It was rumored at the time that she was fired but instead was placed on administrative leave. Marlon Paz, her husband, works for one of Washington’s most well-connected law firms, Schweizer notes.
Melanie Krause has been the acting Commissioner of the IRS since its previous incumbent, Danny Werfel, left his job early when the Trump administration took office. Trump had already stated his intention to nominate Billy Long to the post. Krause resigned this month in the wake of the Trump team’s efforts to coordinate the work of IRS criminal investigators with Homeland Security personnel seeking to identify illegal immigrants in the country.
Schweizer says he thinks Billy Long will be a “breath of fresh air” at the IRS. “He’s a real man of the people,” Schweizer said. In the past, among other controversial opinions Long has said that he might favor dissolving the IRS or substituting a flat or fairer tax code to make tax obligations simpler to meet.
Long has plenty of critics, who note that his career includes no experience in directing an organization as vast as the IRS. His claim to being a “certified tax and business advisor” entails a certification he received after he took a three-day course in Florida. Long spent much of his professional life as a realtor and auctioneer in Missouri.
The message is that taxes are too complicated and easy for wealthy people to game. Eggers raises the story of rock singer Bruce Springsteen, whose New Jersey mansion lowered its tax burden by 90 percent after he installed a bee colony so he could declare an agricultural exemption as a “farm.” The late Sen. Ted Kennedy railed against wealthy tax avoiders for decades but somehow managed to structure his own affairs so that the effective inheritance tax faced by his heirs was less than one percent, Schweizer explains.
Interestingly, the liberal investigative journalism outfit ProPublica produced a report that showed taxpayers in right-leaning counties in the South and West were more likely to have their returns audited than northeastern liberal areas of the country. That study can’t be followed up, Schweizer noted, because the IRS refuses even under the Freedom of Information Act to release county-level statistics on where it conducts audits.
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