(ConservativeCore.com)- Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the Treasury, spoke before Congress and claimed that research shows that color-blind algorithms used to decide audits are biased against people of color.
At a hearing on President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2024, Yellen addressed the House Ways and Means Committee, saying that the IRS needs to be vigilant to ensure equity in tax administration. Reports of the hearing also showed that Yellen was not suggesting that racial information be included on tax filings, and neither did the Internal Revenue Service.
In February, President Biden issued an executive order authorizing the establishment of “Agency Equity Teams” to oversee the government’s use of AI to promote equality.
Yellen said that studies of algorithms like the IRS employ are prejudiced because they’re far more likely to audit taxpayers of color than others in precisely similar circumstances. The IRS needs to become cognisant of that.
According to reports, 87,000 more IRS officers may be hired with the $80 billion marked for “the Inflation Reduction Act” that Biden enacted into law last August. Several analysts have speculated that medium- and small-sized enterprises will be the primary targets of an enlarged Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
The founder of “Americans for Tax Reform, ” Grover Norquist, recently appeared on Fox News, where he slammed the Biden administration’s assurances that a more extensive IRS would not pursue the average taxpayer.
Norquist predicted that there would be over a million audits. There are fewer than 1,000 billionaires and 500 corporations in the Fortune 500. We make up the rest. We are the ones they are going to audit, he explained.
The IRS was under fire in 2021 when ProPublica released tax information indicating the “real tax rate” paid by some of the wealthiest Americans, and in 2013 when a similar breach included Conservative groups. The leaks are still being investigated.
Under the Obama administration, the IRS was also accused of unfairly targeting the Tea Party. No one at the IRS was criminally charged.
