How Democrats' beefed-up IRS could hurt low-income Americans

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That's because the IRS disproportionately targets low-income Americans when it conducts tax audits each year.

In fact, households with less than $25,000 in earnings are five times as likely to be audited by the agency than everyone else, according to a recent analysis of tax data from fiscal year 2021 by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

According to the Syracuse study, more than half of the correspondence audits initiated by the IRS last year — 54% — involved low-income workers with gross receipts of less than $25,000 who claimed the earned income tax credit, an anti-poverty measure. .

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images / Getty Images).

"Barring an unlikely significant change in the composition of IRS enforcement, the stepped-up IRS enforcement would subject taxpayers across the income spectrum to more scrutiny and greater audit risk," the right-wing Heritage Foundation said in a recent blog post.

Although that group earns considerably less income than others, it faced recommended tax adjustments from the IRS of about $3.4 billion in fiscal year 2010.

That compares to about $3.7 billion for those Americans reporting more than $50,000.

The IRS has maintained that it will not increase audits on households earning less than $400,000 if the $80 billion in funding is approved

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