The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Watching The Herd Stampede

Posted on | August 9, 2022 | Comments Off on Watching The Herd Stampede

— by Wombat-socho


Silicon Valley delenda est.

IRS headquarters in Mordor-on-the-Potomac



This weekend the Senate passed, and Slow Joe signed, the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act”, and today the right side of the blogosphere was full of folks screaming about the part where the IRS will get funding for 87,000 new agents, which certainly seems to fit the complaint memorably issued by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.


I first caught sight of this on Dana Loesch’s Instagram, and left the comment that as far as I was concerned this was no big deal. The IRS’ staffing problems are of long standing, and much of the problem boils down to the fact that very few accountants want to work for one of the most hated agencies of the Federal government when they can earn a lot more money and a lot less enmity signing up with Deloitte, KPMG, or some smaller accounting shop. The IRS was desperate enough to make me an offer this spring (almost a year after I filed an application with them while I was on unemployment last year) and I don’t even have an accounting degree. I do have fifteen years of seasonal experience preparing taxes, especially small business Schedule Cs, and I think that was what led them to make me an offer. Unfortunately for the IRS, the offer was for a position in Ogden, Utah, which is a long way from my current burrow in rural Nevada, and the pay for a GS-5 Step 1 is not much more than I’m earning from disability and my tax season work with H&R Block, so I turned them down. But think on it – they are so desperate for bodies they were seriously considering hiring a 62-year-old semi-retired tax professional who hadn’t held a full-time job sine 2009. Would they be doing that if they could find freshly-minted accounting majors from…anywhere?

Coming at this from a slightly different angle, there was no shortage of people in the comments to Dana’s post harrumphing “Well, they don’t need accountants, they just need activists to harass Republicans!” Yeah, sure, they’ll be issuing the brown shirts and Democrat Party brassards right after these people fill out their Standard Form 86. People need to tighten their tinfoil hats and consider that 1) nothing gets done quickly by the Feds, especially in the hiring process, and 2) the IRS can’t just hire unqualified schmucks to stand around and menace the taxpayers. I would be extremely surprised if the IRS managed to get the job requirements for the new meat done before the end of the calendar year/beginning of tax season, much less hire more than a few hundred agents. By then, assuming everyone on the Right has been out doing the necessary field work, the Red Tsunami should have swept a lot of Democrats out of Congress, and even if McCarthy & O’Connell can’t manage to outright repeal this shameful bill, they should be able to slice here, trim there, and tie up the IRS personnel bureaucrats long enough to keep anywhere near 87,000 agents from getting hired.

Finally, there’s no guarantee the IRS is going to use those agents the way the Democrats want them used. Right now the staffing crunch is so bad that a lot of paper returns filed in 2021 haven’t even been looked at, much less processed, and if they haven’t finished 2021, what do you think their stack of 2022 returns looks like? The IRS very badly wants those returns finished, because every one that doesn’t get done in a timely fashion means that either the IRS owes interest on the refunds or they aren’t collecting the debts owed by people with balances due. I suspect a lot of the 87,000 new chums are going to be handed a desk, a banker’s box full of returns, and told “I don’t want to see your face until these are done. You have until Friday – and don’t forget you’re on six-month probation, rookie.”

So be of good cheer. Maybe some of the crazies on the left want to use these new T-men to be goon squads in the service of the Great Reset, but I don’t think it’s going to work out that way.


Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Dana Loesch, Farce

Comments

Comments are closed.