January 9, 2023

U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Representative,

You will soon be considering H.R. 23, the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act, which would repeal provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that provided $80 billion in new funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to hire 87,000 new agents and $15 million to study whether the IRS should create its own tax preparation software.  On behalf of the more than one million members and supporters of the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW), I urge you to support this bill.

The IRA increased IRS funding by 600 percent, making the agency’s budget larger than the State Department, FBI, and Customs and Border Patrol combined.  The IRS has been on the Government Accountability Office’s High-Risk List since 1990, due to its failure to accomplish its core mission.  The agency continues to fail to answer all of the phone calls it receives and has a backlog of millions of unprocessed tax returns.  The funding provided to the IRS in the IRA will lead to more audits for millions of Americans making under $400,000. 

By rescinding the influx of unobligated funding allocated for enforcement and operations and to hire more IRS agents, the Family and Small Business Protection Act is a win for all taxpayers.  The legislation would also eliminate the unobligated funds from the $15 million provided by the IRA to study whether the IRS should create its own tax preparation software program.  This study would be a complete waste of money, since the existing Free File program allows up to 70 percent of taxpayers to file their taxes at no cost using private sector resources rather than the government’s money, and the IRS had already squandered $17.1 million in a failed attempt to create such a program in the mid-1990s.

For these reasons, I urge you to support H.R. 23.  All votes related to the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act will be among those considered in CCAGW’s 2023 Congressional Ratings. 

Sincerely,

Tom Schatz 
President, CCAGW 

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