West Virginians are not strangers to headaches caused by Washington, D.C. The policies coming out of the nation’s capital are often directly at odds with our economy and our way of life. Just because Washington’s bad ideas are unsurprising, doesn’t mean they aren’t harmful. That’s exactly the case with a proposal being debated in Congress that would create a new mandate for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to automatically generate a tax return for every American taxpayer.
It would be a massive understatement to call this requirement an undue burden. The IRS is already notoriously inefficient and unresponsive to the real-world needs of taxpayers. The agency recently announced that it’s still processing 24 million tax returns from last year’s filing period. This year, the IRS already reversed the decision to introduce an online tool to help individuals and families claim child tax credits because they were concerned it would add to the backlog and extend delays in processing returns.
Government officials have even warned that we should expect a “lower level of service” than usual – an interesting prospect for anyone who has firsthand experience dealing with the agency. Many Americans rely on certified tax professionals because of the complexity of navigating through the web of requirements to complete and file their forms. If a government-generated tax return contains an error or omission, taxpayers themselves would be on the hook to get the IRS to fix the problem. That’s not a challenge anyone wants to tackle with 24 million people in line in front of them.
Even more troubling than dealing with the bureaucratic morass,is the idea that a government agency charged with taking money from taxpayers would be the very agency telling us how much we owe. This represents a major conflict of interest. It’s also the reason people who prepare taxes professionally can make a living doing so: they are incentivized to examine every possible deduction so taxpayers can keep more of the money they earn. Does anyone believe the IRS can be trusted to do the same?
When it comes to trust, lawmakers who support the automatic filing policy are asking taxpayers to trust the IRS more when the agency has given us nothing but reasons to trust it less. Generating electronic tax returns for every taxpayer will require the agency to handle significant amounts of sensitive data and personal information. This is the same agency that allowed 700,000 taxpayer accounts to be compromised in a data breach just a few years ago. It’s also the same agency that a government watchdog found to be using sensitive data to target organizationsbased on political affiliation for nearly a decade.
When the House of Delegates was in session earlier this year, I was a strong supporter of House Bill 4007, which would have cut personal income taxes in West Virginia by 10 percent across the board. That’s because I believe West Virginians deserve to keep more of their hard-earned money. Giving the IRS more power, more authority, and more trust to get it right would do just the opposite. There’s simply no way that mandating an automatic tax return generated by the government’s tax collection agency would be in the best interest of American taxpayers. Congress should reject this idea outright and spend more of its time working on solutions that protect taxpayers instead.
Josh Holstein serves in the West Virginia House of Delegates representing Boone County.