With just weeks remaining before the new tax season opens, Congress walloped the IRS with $341 million in budget cuts. That’s in addition to earlier slashes to the IRS budget of more than $1 billion since 2010, resulting in nearly 13,000 employee layoffs.

Is that a wise choice or an act of spite toward an unpopular agency?

Congress touted that the cuts are much needed but to others it looks like something else – revenge. You see many in Congress are still fuming about this year’s earlier tax-exempt organization scandal and those missing Lerner emails. There are other members of Congress that are angry about reports of wasteful spending. And still there are other members of Congress that see this as a great opportunity to keep IRS from properly implementing pieces of the Affordable Care Act – yes, the same Act that Congress pushed Read More

On January 17, 2014, President Barack Obama signed into law the omnibus appropriations bill to fund the government through fiscal year 2014, bringing Internal Revenue Service funding below its 2009 level! The Consolidated Appropriations Act (H.R. 3547) allocates $11.3 billion to the Internal Revenue Service, which is a $526 million decrease, or 4.4% decrease from the previous year.

This makes the Internal Revenue Service one of the biggest losers in the 2014 budget deal, since the service would get just $11.3 billion, which is $526 million below its 2013 budget and $1.7 billion less than President Obama requested and is lower than its 2009 budget. Read More