The ink was hardly dry on the Senate passage of the deceitfully named “Inflation Reduction Act” before the IRS issued a call for 87,000 new agents to be hired. As many are already aware, the job requirements included a willingness to use lethal force. Lethal force? For an IRS agent? Not even someone in the Justice Department with law enforcement training and supervision?
As we will soon see, this is not just about the IRS, but for the moment, let us take a closer look at this most immediate act by a justifiably mistrusted government agency.
Presently, there are just under 181,000 active duty US Marines. Since it is expected that military operations would be conducted under hostile conditions, any force operating in a battlefield environment must provide its own food, fuel, munitions and other supplies. This logistic tail consumes most of the manpower, leaving only about 15%, or 27,000 actual combat troops available. Since the IRS would not have such a logistics requirement, that means that the new IRS army would have potentially over three times the number of combat trained and equipped agents available as does the US Marine Corps! It actually gets worse.
The IRS 2021 annual report outlines some of the training that special agents receive. This training includes use of firearms, breaching actions, and defensive tactics, in addition to general use of force. Included are a few weeks of training in tax law, investigative methods, how to detect and identify tax evasion and money laundering and how to prove the presence of unreported income.
Anyone surviving the initial audit activities will have the opportunity to present their defense to the tax court – a court specifically for tax related matters and where most decisions cannot be appealed. It is surprisingly difficult to find information on how many cases are won by taxpayers contesting IRS actions.This militarization of the IRS is not just a recent thing. An article in the Wall Street Journal in 2016 during the Obama regime, pointed out how the IRS was being armed even then. They asked a number of questions about why the IRS with 2,300 special agents at the time needed over 11 million dollars in guns, ammunition and special tactical equipment such as bullet proof vests.
The article also pointed out expenditures by other agencies besides the IRS. We will look at some of that next.
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