New Hampshire Union Leader, 11/17/11
By Grover Norquist
With the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction – also known as the “super committee” – working secretly behind closed doors to come up with $1.5 trillion of deficit-reduction savings required by the debt limit deal, overburdened taxpayers should be on the outlook for stealth tax increases. One idea that should greatly concern everyone is the Obama administration’s proposal to let the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) enter the tax preparation business.
This plan has been kicking around Washington for years and could find its way into the super committee’s recommendations under the guise of tax reform unless a bright light is shined on it.
During his campaign for the presidency, a core component of Barack Obama’s tax agenda was a provision to put IRS bureaucrats in charge of filling out tax returns for millions of Americans. Under the proposal, the IRS would prepare tax returns based on information it already possessed and then send a bill or refund to taxpayers in the mail. At the time, Obama argued that his proposal would spare Americans the frustration and cost of preparing their own taxes, but in reality, it was just a sneaky way for big-spending politicians to collect more tax revenue to underwrite their big-government policy ambitions.
The proposal today is no different. Allowing the IRS to prepare tax returns would be an unprecedented expansion of the tax collection agency’s responsibilities. It would also create a major conflict of interest that would disadvantage taxpayers. With the federal government carrying a national debt in excess of $14 trillion, who really believes that the bureaucrats working at the IRS, whose job it is to maximize tax revenue, would be dutiful in ensuring that ever American receives every deduction, credit and exemption they are afforded by law?
Even the brain behind Obama’s plan, liberal economist Austan Goolsbee, admitted that his idea was intended to close the imagined $300 billion tax gap between what the government says it’s owed and what Americans pay each year in taxes. Make no mistake, this is nothing more than a back-door tax increase that would hit working-class Americans the hardest because they are less likely than affluent taxpayers to have the means and will to challenge the IRS and hire outside help to ensure their tax returns are prepared correctly.
Another troublesome aspect of this proposal is the fact that the IRS has a very hard time getting things right. Even if we give the tax-collecting bureaucrats the benefit of the doubt that they would honestly attempt to ensure that every tax return they prepare would include all of the proper offsets, we have no reason to trust their competency. A September 2009 report from Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration tested whether taxpayers received quality service, including accurate preparation of their income tax returns, when visiting IRS websites. The report found that of 49 sample returns presented by the IRS, only 29 were properly prepared. Had the tax returns actually been filed, 17 taxpayers would have missed out on a total of $4,318 in tax refunds.
Not surprisingly, when voters are made aware of Obama’s IRS plan, they resoundingly reject it. In a new poll conducted by Public Policy Polling (PPP), a Democratic polling firm, 71 percent of voters nationally said they would not trust the IRS to prepare their taxes. Only 19 percent said they would trust the IRS. By a margin of 73 percent to 21 percent, voters said they believed it would be a conflict of interest for the IRS to be both the nation’s tax collector and a tax preparer for people.
The super committee and rank-and-file members of Congress should heed voter sentiment on Obama’s IRS plan. Eighty percent of voters in the PPP poll say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who backed an IRS expansion that allowed the agency to enter the tax preparation business. Seventy-nine percent say they would be upset if the super committee includes the IRS plan in its deficit reduction package at the end of the year.
If Congress makes the unforgivable mistake of putting the IRS in charge of preparing tax returns for the American people, lawmakers should gird themselves for a grassroots uprising that will spread across the nation like a wildfire. Some lines should never be crossed. The clear division between tax collector and tax preparer is one of them.
To prevent this bad idea from gaining traction, voters in New Hampshire should ask the presidential candidates over the next several weeks to oppose allowing the IRS to fill out their tax returns.
Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform.
