If you give me $100, and I never pay you back, how inclined would you be to give me another $100 the next time we run into one another? Not that inclined, I’m guessing. Despite this very rudimentary thought exercise, the Biden Admin decided to drop $30B on serious debtors.
A new audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that in a 14-month period, the federal government awarded 2.1 million contracts and grants worth over $30 billion to nearly 4,000 awardees who owed a combined $891 million in delinquent taxes, Just The News reports.
These companies owe nearly a billion dollars in taxes —and we just gave them $3o billion more?
“Between October 2018 and December 2019, the Federal Government awarded 2.1 million Federal contracts and grants to more than 83,000 awardees,” the audit found. “Of these, 3,040 contractors received almost $10.2 billion in Federal contracts while owing $621.8 million in delinquent Federal taxes. In addition, 938 grantees received $22.7 billion in Federal grants while owing $269.2 million in delinquent Federal taxes.”
The main offenders: school districts or transit agencies, and colleges and universities.
Here’s another kick in the head: remember how Biden wanted to dump billions into hiring 87,000 new IRS agents, beefing up the agency to target middle-income Americans? Well, here’s what they did with the last $30 million we gave them.
“The IRS was allocated $30 million by Congress to create an application called the Federal Contractor Tax Check System that would reveal if entities owed delinquent taxes. The agency set up a working group in October 2020 to implement the application and as of June 2022 has spent $8.54 million on design and implementation efforts,” Just The News reports.
“The IRS has designed a technical solution to build the FCTCS and plans a foundational release in November 2022 that automates the rules underlying the performance of a tax check for business taxpayers,” the audit reports.
So, the money we gave them to build the system to track delinquent taxes isn’t ready yet and, not surprisingly, they are continuing to blindly hand money to debtors in a move that will likely have negative effects on the economy.
The IRS is “prohibited from disclosing taxpayer information for non-tax administration purposes, including other Federal agencies contracting activities and grant awards,” IRS Chief Privacy Officer Robert Choi wrote in a memo to Deputy Inspector General Healther Hill.
It’s the lack of transparency that’s concerning here.
