Scott Joins Senate Finance Republicans in Defending Taxpayers Against IRS Harassment

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), member of the Senate Finance Committee, joined Senator Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, and his Senate colleagues in requesting information from the IRS and calling for an investigation from the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) on numerous serious reports of IRS employee misconduct.

The move to hold the IRS accountable comes as multiple outlets have reported the IRS’s troubling pattern of harassing taxpayers and violating their rights during heavy-handed visits to private homes, and businesses.

In a letter to the IRS, the senators requested additional information to help the Committee unravel these allegations.

“As Commissioner of the IRS, you pledged an oath to uphold the Constitution and become personally responsible to ‘ensure’ that all IRS employees ‘act in accord’ with each of the statutory taxpayer rights, including the right to a fair and just tax system,” the senators wrote. “We are concerned that these serious allegations, which have occurred in a short period of time and represent a diverse array of taxpayers, could show a pattern of heavy-handed IRS misconduct.”

In a separate letter to TIGTA, the senators also requested an investigation into one specific alleged incident of IRS misconduct and taxpayer intimidation, highlighting the statutory responsibility of TIGTA to supervise the operations of the IRS, including its criminal functions and employees.

“Americans have a right to know whether the serious allegations described above are being investigated,” the senators wrote. “We urge TIGTA to open an investigation immediately, and further ask TIGTA to be prepared to provide Members of the Finance Committee with regularly scheduled updates and briefings on the progress of your investigation.”

Joining Senators Scott and Crapo as cosigners of the letters were Senators John Barrasso, (R-Wyo.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-La.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), John Thune (R-S.D..), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), and Todd Young (R-Ind.).

Read the letter to the IRS here, and the letter to TIGTA here.

BACKGROUND

Senator Scott’s work to reign in the IRS and protect American taxpayers includes the following:

• Raising concerns with the IRS’ intrusive identity verification measures which would violate affect private taxpayer information and civil liberties.
• Writing a letter to IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig raising concerns and questions about the IRS’s destruction of an estimated 30 million paper-filed documents in March 2021 reportedly due to a backlog in processing paper documents.
• Offering a motion to amend the Democrats’ plan to put $45 billion toward hiring thousands of new agents to target hardworking Americans and instead redirect the funds to parents, empowering them to get their children back on track after months — and in some cases, years — of learning loss caused by school closures.
• Pushing a bill to prevent the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from using the Democrats’ massive, $80 billion infusion of taxpayer dollars to squeeze more revenue out of Americans earning less than $400,000 per year.
• Supporting the IRS Funding Accountability Act. The legislation responds to the Democrats’ use of the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA) to infuse the IRS with $80 billion of new funding without any oversight measures to prevent waste, protect taxpayer rights, or measure improvements of service.
• Introducing the IRS Accountability and Taxpayer Protection Act to prohibit the IRS from using penalties as a bargaining chip in reaching resolutions more favorable to the agency at the expense of hardworking Americans.