Christmas Comes Early for the IRS

With the House's clearance of the $447 billion omnibus spending bill on Thursday and the Senate expected to pass the same legislation this weekend, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is set to finally get that substantial boost in funding this year.

During appropriation mark-ups [2] earlier this year, Congress allocated $12.2 billion to the revenue service, with a majority of this increased funding going towards enforcement. In fact, the IRS's enforcement budget will grow 7 percent to $5.5 billion in FY 2010, which began Oct.1. This new level of enforcement funding is an increase of $386.7 million over FY 2009 levels and equal to the president's request.

These much –needed increases in IRS funding represent a reversal in the lethargic funding approved during the Bush administration. These funds, with the aid of new tax treaties [3], will give a big boost to the IRS's efforts [4] to track down tax cheats and schemers both domestically and internationally, and will hopefully help bring a measure of needed equity to the tax code.

Image by Flickr user styro [5] used under a Creative Commons license.