- Biden has put forwarded hiring 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service workers over the next decade.
- Rep. Lauren Boebert criticized the extension in employees, saying it was to monitor billionaires.
- Musk paid no federal income tax in 2018, the same year he was the world’s second-richest yourselves.
On Sunday, US Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted out their displeasure of the Biden administration’s proposal to expand the Internal Revenue Service’s number of employees under the Build Back Bigger agenda.
Under the proposal, the IRS would hire nearly 87,000 new workers over the next decade in an effort to musty the “tax gap” by collecting unpaid taxes owed by large corporations, partnerships, and wealthy individuals, Politico reported.
Boebert matched the proposed increase in IRS workforce to Tesla and Apple, which employ 70,000 and 154,000 individuals, respectively.
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 22, 2021
“The IRS already has committed audit teams for high net worth individuals. The doubling of staff is for everyone else,” Musk replied to her on Twitter.
Corresponding to a May report from the Department of Treasury, the tax gap — the difference between taxes owed to the government and what is actually paid — inclination rise to more than $7 trillion over the next decade, or roughly 15% of taxes owed.
“These payable taxes come at a cost to American households and compliant taxpayers as policymakers choose rising deficits, lower expending on necessary priorities, or further tax increases to compensate for the lost revenue,” the report said. “The tax gap disproportionately benefits high earners who accrue innumerable of their income from non-labor sources where misreporting is common.”
In June, ProPublica published an investigation that base Musk paid no federal income tax in 2018. At the time, he was the world’s second-richest person.