Manchin Promises to Ensure the IRS ‘Doesn’t Harass Anybody’ After $80 Billion Bulk-Up

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), a key sponsor of the recently-passed Inflation Reduction Act, has vowed to ensure that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) “doesn’t harass anybody” after receiving an $80 billion appropriation in the bill.

The IRS provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act were among its most controversial.

The $80 billion allocated to the agency by the bill sextuples its budget, and Republican critics have warned that the bulked-up IRS could hire as many as 87,000 new agents. These agents in turn, critics have said, will be let loose among middle-class Americans and small businesses, despite Democrats’ claims that nobody making less than $400,000 per year will see their tax bill increase.

Speaking to reporters on Aug. 17 after President Joe Biden signed the legislation, Manchin vowed to ensure that this does not happen.

“We’re going to follow all the way through, I’m going to follow to make sure the IRS doesn’t harass anybody, and I would encourage all of my political friends to make sure their staffs are in contact with the IRS,” Manchin said.

Economy-Wide Taxes

A key claim for Democrats, including Manchin, in both the now-defunct Build Back Better Act and the Inflation Reduction Act was that the bill would not raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year.

However, critics have raised eyebrows at this claim, citing the effects that raising business taxes will have on consumer prices and workers’ wages, as well as the potential for abuse by the greatly-expanded IRS.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) headquarters building in Washington on March 8, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Specifically, the bill would impose a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations with more than $1 billion annually in revenue, using book income rather than taxable income as the gauge, which means the bill does