A theme of President Joe Biden’s administration has been an insistence on a more equitable tax system for Americans. 

According to the White House, one of their priorities has been to add “real fairness to the tax code.” The White House goes on to say that “one of the most important ways” they have done so is “by providing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with the resources they need to reduce the tax gap and improve service delivery for taxpayers.” 

In practice, however, this has been anything but the case.

In public, Biden repeats the tired line that he is going to “make the rich pay their fair share,” as he did at the recent presidential debate. 

First, such proposals do not provide nearly enough revenue to cover the president’s spending wish list, nor are they in touch with the reality that the federal government already has high taxes on the nation’s highest earners. The Biden administration’s empowerment of the IRS will only have the same result it’s had for years: everyday Americans will find themselves harassed by the agency for greater audit scrutiny.

ProPublica keeps data on which areas of the country are most likely to be targeted by the IRS for added audits. When one looks at the map, they might be surprised to find that high-earning areas such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, or even Washington, D.C., are not among the most scrutinized. In fact, the most highly targeted county in the nation by the IRS is Humphreys County, Mississippi. One-third of Humphreys residents live below the poverty line, and the average annual income is a meager $18,000 per year.

Many of the poorest counties in the nation have the most heightened concentration of IRS audits. Not even the IRS is willing to claim that this is in any way a coincidence. In 2019, then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig testified before Congress that auditing low-income Americans is “the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources.” The justification Rettig supplied after that stunning quote was that lower-income Americans do not have the resources to fight back as well, so auditing them does not tie up as many agency staff.

Unfortunately, this trend also means that minorities in America find themselves in the crosshairs of the IRS’s auditors more frequently. Ethnic minorities comprise majorities in just 151 counties in the United States. Of those, 144 receive audit scrutiny above the national average. Again, to claim this is a coincidence would be to contradict all available evidence and the testimony of top officials at the IRS itself. 

Further, as recently as 2013, the IRS found itself in hot water for subjecting individuals and organizations with conservative or libertarian leanings to added audits. 

The IRS has also played fast and loose with sensitive taxpayer data. Recently, the IRS leaked sensitive info on the tax-paying habits of wealthy Americans, likely to advance a political agenda. Little, if anything, was done to address the leak. 

In fact, the IRS routinely has failed to secure its devices and was slammed in a recent report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The TIGTA report found the agency was not storing information in a safe way, nor were they “sanitizing” old information with care. Even without malice — just through sheer incompetence — the financial security of average Americans is under threat from this rogue government agency.

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When politicians and bureaucrats wax poetic about fairness in the tax code and promise that the IRS will be the enforcers to bring it about, this should not be believed. Empowering the IRS means they are coming for small businesses, working-class families, and vulnerable communities to make sure they pay more than their fair share. The data and the history bear out this phenomenon well.

Americans can argue about what the proper marginal tax rates should be and what the ultimate goal of the tax code ought to be. However, what is not in dispute is that the IRS has identified an easy way to generate revenue towards partisan ends. It is to go after the people lawmakers like to claim they serve. 

Dan Savickas is director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.