The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is hiring special agents that will be required to “carry a firearm” and “be willing to use deadly force” during possible “dangerous assignments,” according to a job posting on the IRS website.
The special agents will be part of IRS Criminal Investigation Division, described as the service’s “law enforcement branch,” which is designed to combine “accounting skills with law enforcement skills to investigate financial crimes.”
The position’s “major duties” include:
- Maintain “honesty and integrity.”
- Work at least 50 hours each week, including irregular hours.
- Be on-call 24/7, including holidays and weekends.
- Maintain physical readiness to “effectively respond to life-threatening situations on the job.”
- Carry a gun and “be willing to use deadly force, if necessary.
- Participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other “dangerous assignments.”
The IRS is offering a salary of $50,704 – $89,636 per year for the position. The job advertisement has been posted since February, but it’s gaining renewed attention in the wake of the Democrat’s latest bill, which includes nearly $80 billion in funding for the IRS.
The massive funding boost will allow the IRS to hire nearly 87,000 new employees, more than doubling the service’s current size and making it larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.
The Biden administration claimed on Tuesday that no one making under $400,000 per year will face new audits as a result of the funding. Notably, an amendment to the bill that would have forced the IRS to follow that standard – limiting new audits to those making $400,000 or more per year – failed 50-50 in the Senate.
Every Democrat voted against the proposal, whereas every Republican voted in favor of protecting “low- and middle-income earning American taxpayers from an onslaught of audits from an army of new Internal Revenue Service auditors funded by an unprecedented, nearly $80.000.000.000, infusion of new funds.”
According to IRS data, more than half of the audits performed in 2021 targeted taxpayers making less than $75,000 per year, as reported by The Washington Post. Additionally, over 40 percent of audits were aimed at taxpayers who received the earned income tax credit, which is a measure to help reduce poverty.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) said the funding will “put the IRS on steroids.”
“You don’t need that many IRS agents to go after a few people they say are very, very rich,” Barrasso said, adding “families, farmers and the small businesses of Americans, that’s who’s going to bear the burden of this legislation.”
The Washington Post reported that experts believe lower income earners are more often targeted by IRS audits because they don’t have the means to push back — unlike wealthy people, who can hire accountants and lawyers to fight IRS enforcement.
