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June 17, 2023

With vast new resources, the IRS is flexing its muscles

By Andrea Widburg

The bigger the government, the bigger the need for a huge, aggressive tax-collecting arm. Therefore, the Uniparty in Congress acceded to the Democrats’ demand for a larger IRS budget to allow the IRS to hire more agents—87,000 more agents. Today’s news brought a couple of stories about what IRS agents are doing.

First, they’re using their access to businesses’ documents to collect information that the government is not supposed to have—specifically, information about gun owners:

In case you can’t expand the message, the tweet reads as follows:

I met with Tom Vanhoose this morning after 20 armed IRS agents raided his store in Great Falls earlier this week.

Tom informed me that these agents confiscated all the 4473 forms, none of which contain any financial information; instead, the IRS now has access to these forms with sensitive personal details of every customer who purchased a firearm from Highwood Creek Outfitters.

In other words, under cover of collecting information from a business that’s allegedly been remiss in filing its taxes, the IRS is going after protected information about individuals exercising their Second Amendment rights.

Also, in case you’re wondering, the IRS has military-grade power at its back:

A new report shows the Internal Revenue Service has been stocking up on weapons, ammunition and combat gear to the tune of $10 million since 2020.

The findings released last week by OpenTheBooks, a watchdog group that tracks government spending, reveal that in 2021 alone the IRS spent more than $5 million shoring up its arsenal for its increasingly militarized agents.

Since 2020, the oversight group found, the IRS has spent $2.3 million on ammunition, $1.2 million on ballistic shields, $474,000 on Smith & Wesson rifles, $463,000 on Beretta 1301 tactical shotguns and $243,000 on body armor vests.

A slew of other line-item expenditures – include a mysterious $1.3 million spent on “various other gear for criminal investigation agents.”

The tax-collecting agency has also loaded up on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tactical lighting, gear bags, holsters, ballistic helmets and optic sights for weapons since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the report.

Nor is this all that the IRS possesses. The same article notes that,

Since 2006, the agency has spent $35.2 million – adjusted for inflation – on guns, ammo and military-style equipment, according to OpenTheBooks.

In the 1990s, I learned from my sensei that IRS agents are physically attacked more than any other government employees, which is why the IRS hired him to teach self-defense techniques to San Francisco IRS agents. However, what OpenTheBooks describes isn’t a weapons supply necessary for individual agents to defend against personal assaults. It is, instead, a military-style armory. And seemingly, the IRS is getting interested in exactly which Americans might be armed, too.

Taking information to which it’s not entitled isn’t all that the IRS is doing. According to a letter from Rep. Jim Jordan, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to the IRS, one IRS agent is reported to have “provided a false name to an Ohio taxpayer as part of a deception to gain entry into the taxpayer’s home to confront her about delinquent tax filings.” When the taxpayer challenged him, “the IRS agent insisted that he ‘can . . . go into anyone’s house at any time’ as an IRS agent.”

Silly me! I thought we fought a revolution to rein in the government’s ability to use its tax-collecting power in a punitive, overbearing, and even illegal manner against its citizens.

With Democrats, we’re seeing the future: Their government and their allies amongst the citizens are above the law; everybody else is below the law.

Image: IRS headquarters in D.C. by Carol M. Highsmith. Public domain.

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