Most Americans don’t believe the Biden administration’s claims that the 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) workers it’s hiring will target the wealthy, a Convention of States Action / Trafalgar poll found.
The IRS plans to hire 87,000 new employees through a $78 billion cash influx from Congress that was passed through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, but Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen promised the IRS wouldn’t use its newfound resources to target low- to middle-income households or small businesses. Voters don’t believe those claims, the poll found: Only about 31% of voters believe the IRS will actually use its new resources to focus on auditing large corporations and rich people.
A majority of voters believed that the IRS would now target middle-class Americans and small businesses (33%), cash, tip and app workers (3.2%) or political opponents (15.9%), the poll found, while 16.4% were unsure. (RELATED: Democrats Are Turbo-Charging The IRS To Go After The Middle Class)
After todays raid on Mar A Lago what do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents for?
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 9, 2022
Democrats were more likely to take the administration’s claims at face value: 49.8% believed the IRS would audit wealthy Americans and corporations with its new employees and funding, compared to 28.5% of Democrats who expect the 87,000 new employees to audit middle-class Americans, low-income earners, small businesses or political opponents.
“We wanted to understand whether or not voters believe that the true purpose of hiring 87,000 new IRS agents is to focus on–as the Biden Administration has been claiming – ‘large corporate and high-net-worth taxpayers’ or whether something else is afoot,” Mark Meckler, president of the Convention of States, said in a statement. “Democrats believe that this is the case, and that what they’ve been told by their leaders is accurate. Independents and Republicans strongly believe the country is being lied to, and that this new IRS is going to target either everyday Americans, or those who are political opponents of the federal bureaucracy.”
The poll surveyed 1,092 respondents with a 2.9% margin of error.
The Treasury Department did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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