It’s not just the tax code that’s on the ballot this fall in the presidential election, but how that code will be enforced for the next four years. The Biden-era IRS has taken an approach that’s fairly hostile to successful business owners, and it’s probably a good bet the agency will hold fast to its current course if Vice President Kamala Harris wins in November.
Nowhere is the current anti-business owner bias of the IRS on better display that in the agency’s recent announcement that it will aggressively pursue Employee Retention Credit (ERC) clawbacks, where the IRS will serve as both judge and jury in seeking the return of more than $1 billion from 30,000 American small businesses that received funds under the Covid-era program.
The ERC was first passed with great haste by Congress in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, and was initially expected to cost $55 billion. While federal budget evaluators pushed that number up to $78 billion, in reality the cost was a runaway train expected to exceed $550 billion — a monstrous 700 percent cost overrun.
That’s not entirely the IRS’s fault, though. It’s a result of Congress’ failure to do its job as well. The IRS got a responsibility it didn’t ask for, which is administering the ERC program. It’s a legitimate argument to say the agency wasn’t equipped to handle it, and that perhaps it should be forgiven for running the program badly.
That doesn’t change the fact that the IRS did a truly awful
