Democrats are attempting the largest government overreach of our lifetimes. Included in their proposed $3.5 trillion tax and spend spree is a disturbing provision that authorizes the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to surveil Americans’ bank accounts –a blatant invasion of personal privacy.
The Biden Administration claims they are targeting the wealthy elite, but instead are auditing middle class Americans: blue-collar workers, small business owners, and farmers and ranchers. And they are using your tax dollars to do it.
Their legislation allocates $80 billion towards nearly doubling the size and scope of the IRS, hiring 85,000 new agents to perform this surveillance. This would turn Oklahoma banks and financial institutions into local outposts of the IRS to report personal account information back to the federal government.
These institutions would then be required to monitor any account with a threshold of $10,000 in annual deposits or withdrawals, even including transfers to and from another account with the same owner. You may have seen that this number was increased from the $600 originally proposed, but make no mistake, this new number still affects a vast majority of Americans. Beyond that, it’s a Trojan Horse.
Thanks to the Biden Administration’s record high inflation rates, this threshold is easier to reach than ever before. When broken down, $10,000 starts with those who spend an average of only $28 per day. Anyone sending a child to college, transferring savings into their checking account, purchasing a home, or even buying groceries for a family of four will be a target of investigation under the IRS.
The IRS has already proven an inability to safeguard our sensitive information. Just this year, thousands of Americans’ confidential tax information was leaked to ProPublica, published into the mainstream media, and jumped on by the Democrats to use for political gain. Five months later, the IRS still does not know the source of this leak.
To combat this dangerous new precedent for our country, I proudly cosponsored H.R. 5586, the Prohibiting IRS Financial Surveillance Act, alongside 170 of my Republican colleagues, to stop this provision in its entirety. H.R. 5586 would prohibit the IRS from implementing any new reporting requirements for financial institutions as part the Biden Administration’s aggressive bank surveillance regime.
Federal government access into our lives, and especially at this level, should scare every American. I will continue to fight against this invasion of privacy.