Republicans escalate IRS rhetoric as senator warns Americans not to apply for new jobs – By Sahil Kapur (NBC News) / Aug 17, 2022
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen emphasized in an internal memo that new resources for the IRS will be aimed at wealthy tax avoiders, as GOP rhetoric reaches new extremes.
WASHINGTON — It is unusual for a U.S. senator to publicly warn Americans not to apply for a job and threaten to eliminate it.
But that’s what Senate Republican campaign chair Rick Scott, R-Fla., did this week, publishing an open letter encouraging job seekers not to pursue new IRS positions, vowing that Republicans, who hope to take control of Congress next year, will quickly “defund” those jobs.
Scott claimed the Biden administration will use the Democrats’ newly enacted Inflation Reduction Act to create “an IRS super-police force” to “audit and investigate” ordinary Americans. “The IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them,” he wrote, referencing a job posting for the agency’s Criminal Investigation division, which has been mischaracterized.
Scott’s depiction of a new force of IRS agents targeting average Americans lacks basis in the text of the new law and has been dismissed by Democrats as a fabrication. It was debunked — indirectly — by formal guidance Wednesday by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to the IRS.
