The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will soon finalize its plans for the $80 billion in additional funding it received in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. Most expect the IRS to publicly release this report in full, though the Biden administration has not explicitly committed to this. Failure to do so would be irresponsible.

What seems certain to occur is that IRS-boosters will serve up all sorts of explanations for the wonderful things this funding will do, with a side‑order of Republican disparagement, while simultaneously skirting key issues such as efficiency and accountability. Before the spin campaign begins, the public should know some baseline truths.

Supporters claim the IRS will not use the $80 billion to hire 87,000 new employees, instead insisting hiring will mostly backfill employee retirements. In truth, the supersized funding will go toward significantly increasing the IRS’s size, particularly on the enforcement front.

Think of the IRS as having two checking accounts. The first is its annual budget. In 2022, that totaled $12.6 billion in appropriations (plus unknown hundreds of millions more in unaccountable retained fees). The annual budget pays the salaries of all current employees, approximately 80,000 strong in 2022. When IRS employees retire, the unspent funds covering their salaries (and overhead) do not vanish. Instead, the funds are freed up to hire replacement employees.

The second checking account is the $80 billion in supplemental, 10-year funding. Congressional Democrats attached a few legislative strings to this massive account. A critical one is that no less than $45.6 billion must be spent on compensation for “enforcement” personnel. Democrats separately provided another $25.3 billion to keep the lights running for all the IRS’s hires.

More enforcement staff means more audits must follow. So, who will be audited?

Supporters claim the supersized IRS will only target rich tax cheats, with U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen pledging that “audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.”

To presume this “pinky promise” pledge has lasting impact, one must assume it somehow lasts 10 years, outlives multiple agency heads, and does not change overnight without any recourse or accountability.

Neither the Treasury Department nor the IRS has determined how to define or uphold this pledge. When the IRS’s independent watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), asked the Treasury Department and the IRS what this pledge meant, they were told, “as of December 2022, IRS officials have not yet finalized what constituted the $400,000 income level or what historic audit level will be used for its metrics. They indicated that this is still being discussed between the IRS and the Treasury Department.”

This is not surprising, as the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) has told us the biggest component part of the “tax gap” — i.e., enforcement — is comprised of taxpayers in the low- and middle-income brackets. A Wall Street Journal editorial put it best: “The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78% to 90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4% to 9% would come from those making more than $500,000.”

I authored a common-sense provision to statutorily protect working families making less than $400,000 from enhanced IRS enforcement. All of my Senate Republican colleagues voted for it; all Senate Democrats voted against it. I am giving my colleagues another chance by again introducing this legislation for consideration by the new Congress.

Republicans want an IRS that solves problems for taxpayers, not one that creates new headaches. We want hardworking taxpayers to get prompt refunds, have their calls and correspondence to the IRS quickly answered, and know in real time they have satisfied their tax obligations. The vast majority of people seek to accurately pay their taxes and get back to living their lives. Solving the IRS’s woeful taxpayer service and mismanagement is far more important than unleashing a massive number of new auditors to comb through returns with the tax equivalent of a magnifying glass.

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Mike Crapo is a U.S. senator for Idaho and the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee.