(The Center Square) – More Americans believe the latest legislation to hire 87,000 Internal Revenue Service agents is part of a plan to audit middle and lower class Americans and small businesses than to target corporations and wealthy Americans, according to a new poll.
Convention of States Action, along with the Trafalgar group, released the poll that found that “52.1 percent of voters say that the new 87,000 IRS employees, approved by President [Joe] Biden’s legislation, will be used to audit middle-class Americans, low-income earners, and small businesses; or to target the political opponents of those in power.”
The poll comes after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, legislation that allocated $80 billion in additional taxpayer funds to the IRS.
Overall, 33% of those surveyed said the new IRS employees will be used “to audit middle class Americans and small businesses” while 31.6% said they will be used “to audit wealthy Americans and large corporations.”
Another 15.9% said the auditors will be used “to target the political opponents of those in power.”
“We wanted to understand whether or not voters believe that the true purpose of hiring 87,000 new IRS agents is to focus on – the Biden Administration has been claiming – ’large corporate and high-net-worth taxpayers’ or whether something else is afoot,” said Mark Meckler, president of the Convention of States Action. “Democrats believe that this is the case, and that what they’ve been told by their leaders is accurate. Independents and Republicans strongly believe the country is being lied to, and that this new IRS is going to target either everyday Americans, or those who are political opponents of the federal bureaucracy.”
“We have volunteers in every state, and this matches what we are hearing from the grassroots,” Meckler added.
Another recent poll found that most Americans don’t expect the Inflation Reduction Act to actually reduce inflation.
As The Center Square previously reported, a Morning Consult/Politico poll released earlier this month found that only 24% of those surveyed think the bill will actually reduce inflation while 34% said it will make inflation worse.
