News/Commentary

IRS hiring ad raises eyebrows: Willing to carry a firearm, use deadly force if necessary

August 11, 2022 | | Print Article

That the Internal Revenue Service is seeking to hire more special agents for its criminal investigation branch is raising some eyebrows, particularly after the so-called Inflation Reduction Act authorized a big increase in the agency’s overall workforce over the next decade.

According to an IRS job listing, carrying “a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary,” is one of the major job duties. The entry salary is about $50,000, but agents can earn a lot more through “special pay incentives.”

Similar to the duties of other lawmen and women who take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and other federal, state, or local laws that may apply, “Special Agents are duly sworn law enforcement officers who are trained to ‘follow the money,'” the hiring notice explains.

With that in mind, applicants must be “willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.”

The posting also asserts that “No matter what the source, all income earned, both legal and illegal, has the potential of becoming involved in crimes which fall within the investigative jurisdiction of the IRS Criminal Investigation.

IRS special agents are considered “the premier financial investigators for the federal government.”

This posting seems to come at a time when the IRS allegedly has already stockpiled a huge amount of ammo in 2022 as part of a trend that has encompassed years.

“Call me old-fashioned,” U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said on Fox News in June, “but I thought the heaviest artillery an IRS agent would need would be a calculator….in 2022 alone, the IRS has spent around $725,000 on ammunition.”

The following month, Gaetz introduced the Disarm the IRS Act that would stop any further ammo buys if it was enacted.

The Associated Press is claiming that concerns, particularly among GOP politicians such as Gaetz and others, about a large cohort of armed IRS auditors are exaggerated:

The bill will not create any such army, officials and experts say. Only some IRS employees who work on criminal investigations carry firearms as part of their work.

A division of the IRS called criminal investigation serves as the agency’s law enforcement branch. Its agents, who work on issues such as seizing illicit crypto currency and Russian oligarchs’ assets, carry weapons, [Treasury Dept. official Natasha] Sarin said.

There were just more than 2,000 such special agents working at the IRS in 2021, according to agency documents. The branch will get money from the Inflation Reduction Act, but the bulk of the dollars will go toward other areas, according to Sarin.

The bill does not designate money specifically for a large number of armed IRS employees.

 

According to the VERIFY fact-checking website, “we can confirm the IRS did buy nearly $700,000 in ammunition between March 1 and June 1, but it is to arm their criminal division and is not a new trend.”

Insofar as the Democrat legislation authorizing a vast number of new office hires at the federal tax collecting agency as part of an $80 billion appropriation, AP explained that “the IRS will be releasing final numbers for its hiring plans in the coming months, according to a Treasury official.

“But those employees will not all be hired at the same time, they will not all be auditors and many will be replacing employees who are expected to quit or retire, experts and officials say…So that’s a long way from hiring 87,000 ‘agents’ to go after average people in the United States, as the GOP claims have it.”

As a footnote, and wholly unrelated to the issue of special agents, liberals are relying on a talking point that no ordinary middle-class citizen who pays his or her taxes has anything to worry about with the bureaucratic expansion.

Accountants, both in the private and public sectors, do make mistakes, however, apart from any other motivations and priorities that might be in play.

Moreover, people still remember how the IRS under Obama subjected conservative groups who applied for nonprofit status to disproportionate scrutiny.

U.S. Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) has proposed an amendment to Joe Biden’s latest spending spree that would redirect funding to more pressing needs. “Instead of hiring 87,000 more IRS agents to treat working families like tax cheats, that funding should be directed to the crisis on the southern border,” he told Breitbart News.

Back in 2020, NBC Tulsa, Okla., affiliate KJRH TV aired this brief report about the IRS criminal division:

Get the latest BPR news delivered free to your inbox daily. SIGN UP HERE

DONATE TO BIZPAC REVIEW

Please help us! If you are fed up with letting radical big tech execs, phony fact-checkers, tyrannical liberals and a lying mainstream media have unprecedented power over your news please consider making a donation to BPR to help us fight them. Now is the time. Truth has never been more critical!

$10
$15
$25
$50
Other
$
Success! Thank you for donating. Please share BPR content to help combat the lies.
Robert Jonathan
Latest posts by Robert Jonathan (see all)

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

PLEASE JOIN OUR NEW COMMENT SYSTEM! We love hearing from our readers and invite you to join us for feedback and great conversation. If you've commented with us before, we'll need you to re-input your email address for this. The public will not see it and we do not share it.

Latest Articles