Sometimes it’s the government that gets caught with its hand in the cookie jar and in very rare cases, they might mend their ways. Perhaps that’s what happened earlier this year when journalist Matt Taibbi appeared in front of the House Judiciary Committee to testify about the Twitter Files. Unbeknownst to Taibbi, while he was being sworn in, an IRS agent showed up at his home and left an ominous note on his door. The move clearly seemed to suggest an attempt to intimidate Taibbi, and Jim Jordan subsequently sent a letter to the IRS and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding an explanation. It sounds like Jordan’s message was received and acted upon. Now the IRS is announcing that they will end “most” unannounced home visits by agents except in “unique” cases. (National Review)

The IRS announced Monday that it will “end most” unannounced home visits in a move that “reverses a decades-long practice.”

“We are taking a fresh look at how the I.R.S. operates to better serve taxpayers and the nation, and making this change is a common-sense step,” IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel, said in an official statement. “Changing this longstanding procedure will increase confidence in our tax administration work and improve overall safety for taxpayers and I.R.S. employees.”

The agency noted that such visits would continue in only “unique” cases and that agents are generally dispatched in situations usually involving over $100,000 in outstanding tax bills.

Taibbi went on to tell National Review this week that he had been contacted by other people who had even worse experiences than he did. He surmised that the IRS has been used as a tool to “investigate a range of politically irritating people.”

That’s putting it mildly. Taibbi was only one of a number of people who were dragged into contested political issues and subsequently learned that they had come under closer scrutiny by the IRS. But that scrutiny appears to be highly selective. According to one study released by Syracuse University in January, the IRS audits a surprisingly small number of millionaires. But the ones that do get audited seem to be donors to conservative causes on a mysteriously frequent basis. Prominent Democratic donors don’t appear to attract the tax man’s attention nearly as often.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, the largest percentage of IRS audits are launched against households earning less than $25,000 annually. And it’s not as if this bias is a recent development. You may recall back in 2017 when Lois Lerner was forced to apologize after years of the agency’s pattern of “aggressively” scrutinizing Tea Party organizations and other conservative groups, frequently denying them exemptions and other routine requests. Meanwhile, liberal groups were investigated far less often.

And if all of that wasn’t troubling enough, a separate report earlier this year found that Black families were five times as likely to have their federal tax returns audited than white or Asian families. How does that happen in a way that seems so wildly beyond random statistical chance? The agency blames it on “a flawed AI algorithm.” They also claim that there is no direct correlation to race, but it’s simply a matter of Black families “tending to make the types of mistakes” that the IRS focuses on, particularly in terms of the number of dependents being claimed.

Even if all of that is true, there is no AI algorithm to explain away conservative versus liberal bias. This apparent weaponization of the IRS never seems to go in the other direction, however. Someone needs to ask the IRS commissioner if anyone ever bothered to stop by Hunter Biden’s house between 2015 and 2018 when he failed to pay taxes on millions of dollars in undisclosed foreign income. If they had, perhaps they wouldn’t have “accidentally” allowed the charges against him to lapse due to the statute of limitations. But that would have made for some inconvenient headlines, so I’m sure they never got around to it.