IRS ‘significantly’ more likely to audit taxpayers under Democratic control

It’s not just a figment of the conservative imagination. According to a Harvard-backed study, the Internal Revenue Service is a bigger pain in the neck when Democrats control the federal government.

The comprehensive study of the agency’s activities dating back to 1978 shows that Democratic control leads to more spending on the agency (big surprise, we know).

“Democratic control of the Senate is correlated with an increased IRS budget and workforce. The president’s party has a statistically significant impact on the number of IRS enforcement personnel when both houses of Congress are controlled by Democrats,” the research, published last week in the Journal of Public Policy, said.

The increased hiring leads to an uptick in audits for individual and corporate tax filers.

The president is not able to directly increase or lower the IRS budget alone— but the nation’s top elected official can significantly alter the agency’s direction by moving employees around.

And Democratic presidents tend to be sticklers for tax enforcement.

“Although there is no effect of the party affiliation of the President on the overall IRS budget and workforce, party affiliation of the President makes a difference to the share of those resources that are allocated towards enforcement. Enforcement-related activity, in particular, the number of criminal investigators and revenue officers is significantly higher during a Democratic Presidency,” said Sutirtha Bagchi, the study’s author and assistant professor of economics at Villanova University.

Overall, Bagchi determined that corporate audits are 5 percent more likely to occur when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. Personal audits increase by about 4 percent under Democratic administrations.

The study offers a little insight into how some recent IRS scandals likely kicked off.

As taxpayer rights expert Dan Pill wrote for Personal Liberty^® in 2010:

When the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released its five-year strategic plan last year it promised a flurry of new attacks on the public in a variety of areas. Referred to by the IRS as “enforcement initiatives,” these attacks constitute the key areas the agency will target for increased audit attention in the years to come. What was a mere promise last fall of more audit activity is now a reality. The IRS just recently launched the first wave of audit attacks.

In the years that followed, while Democrats controlled the federal government, those “enforcement initiatives” snowballed into the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups under the direction of former tax official Lois Lerner.

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