PRESS RELEASE
Thursday, August 4, 2022
ATLANTA – Today, Team Herschel released the following statement highlighting how Raphael Warnock’s proposed partisan spending bill would allow the IRS to target lower- and middle-income Georgians.
Warnock’s bill would allot $80 billion in new funding to the IRS, which is over six times its current budget of $12.6 billion. Specifically, the bill sets aside $45.6 billion for “enforcement”, “litigation”, “criminal investigations”, “investigative technology”, and “digital asset monitoring”. The main targets of this “enforcement” would be the middle-class as the IRS knows they cannot afford to push back against these audits.
Hard-working Georgians are the target of Warnock’s reckless legislation. The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that “from 78 percent to 90 percent of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4 percent to 9 percent would come from those making more than $500,000″.
Even with all this new money, Georgians should not expect better service or process at the IRS, as Warnock’s bill only allocates $3.2 billion to help taxpayers. In the 2022 filing season, the IRS only managed to answer 10% of its phone calls. The Taxpayer Advocate Service revealed in June that as of May 31 the IRS was still sitting on 21.3 million unprocessed paper tax returns, with millions of taxpayers “waiting six months or more to receive their refunds”.
“Raphael Warnock has always done more to support Joe Biden than hard-working Georgians,” said spokesperson Mallory Blount. “Instead of helping Georgia families struggling to afford the Biden agenda, Warnock is targeting them more to fund his progressive wish-list. Georgians want Washington to stay out of their bank accounts and work to lower costs, Raphael Warnock’s bill does the exact opposite. Georgia needs a Senator who actually takes the time to read legislation instead of blindly supporting Joe Biden’s reckless spending agenda.”
