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Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) and Representative Kevin Brady (R-TX) in introducing the Tax Gap Reform and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Enforcement Act, which would protect taxpayers against Democrats’ efforts to monitor Americans’ bank accounts, place taxpayer finances in a surveillance dragnet, and provide massive, additional mandatory funding to IRS for an army of IRS agents.
 
“Many Americans are understandably concerned with the IRS’s long history of overreach and ideological bias. Democrat proposals to dramatically increase IRS funding while engaging in new surveillance efforts pose a serious threat to taxpayers’ rights and privacy,” Rubio said. “This legislation takes steps to ensure that taxpayers are protected.” 
 
“In light of recent proposals to massively expand the IRS, with unprecedented amounts of mandatory funding, and the IRS’s continued abuses of taxpayer rights and privacy, any additional IRS funding and monitoring of Americans’ private finances must come with guardrails to help protect against abuses,” Crapo said. “This legislation places important guardrails around IRS funding to protect taxpayers’ rights and privacy.” 
 
“Before American taxpayers are subjected to 80,000 new IRS agents and surveillance of their private bank accounts, let’s begin with an accurate, independent estimate of Treasury’s so-called ‘tax gap,’” Brady said. “This bill also protects taxpayers from IRS targeting based on their political or religious beliefs and closes loopholes that risk leaking private taxpayer returns.”
 
Background:
 
Under the guise of closing the “tax gap,” Democrats are seeking to increase IRS funding by a massive $80 billion over the next 10 years to expand “enforcement and compliance activities” at the IRS, and to create a “comprehensive financial account information reporting regime,” under which gross inflows and outflows of taxpayers’ financial accounts are reported by financial intermediaries to the IRS, effectively acting as IRS agents.
 
Key provisions of the Tax Gap Reform and IRS Enforcement Act:

• Tax Gap Reform: Requires timely, annually-updated information on tax gap estimates in coordination with the Joint Committee on Taxation.
• Taxpayer Protection: Prevents the IRS from targeting Americans for their political and ideological beliefs, codifies President Biden’s pledge to not increase audits of taxpayers making less than $400,000 per year, and prohibits the establishment of new bank reporting requirements.
• Smarter Enforcement: Requires the IRS to use existing data and tools to improve its corporate audit selection process and increase enforcement against high-income non-filers.
• Closes the Expertise Gap: Creates an IRS enforcement fellowship pilot program to assist with the agency’s most complex audits and case selection decisions.  Before hiring thousands of new agents, Congress should test the effectiveness of increasing expertise in a targeted way.

 
Click here for a list of original Senate co-sponsors. 
 
The legislation is supported by the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Tax Reform and the Center for a Free Economy.