Exclusive - Rep. Jason Smith: IRS Needs a 'Reckoning,' Not 'Command and Control' over Tax Preparation

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Monday that the IRS needs a “reckoning,” not “command and control” over Americans’ tax preparation.

The Democrats’ $700 billion Inflation Reduction Act required the IRS to study if it was appropriate for the agency to establish a direct e-file system.

To conduct the study, the IRS hired New America, a leftist think tank where one of its scholars reportedly called for a “military coup” to oust former President Donald Trump after his inauguration. New America receives funding from leftist megadonors such as Laurene Powell Jobs, George Soros, and Reid Hoffman.

Now, the IRS is establishing a pilot project to transform the IRS into the tax preparer, collector, and auditor.

Smith told Breitbart News after years of abuse the IRS should not expand to control more of Americans’ financial lives.

He said, “The IRS should not be the tax preparer, the collector, and also the auditor. If anything, the IRS needs a reckoning. They don’t need more command and control over the lives of all Americans. And that’s in fact what this program does.”

The Inflation Reduction Act, coincidentally, also grants the IRS $80 billion to hire 87,000 additional agents. Smith said the funding would largely target the middle class.

“In fact, we had analysis from the Congressional Budget Office that proved that there would be an increase in audits on people making less than $75,000 a year,” Smith said.

WATCH: CNBC’s Sullivan: “No Way” IRS Spending Plan Won’t “Raise Audits on Middle-Class People”:

Breitbart News’s John Binder reported that the CBO report states that the “IRS audits will take at least $20 billion from working and middle-class Americans earning less than $400,000 a year, which is in addition to the billions already taken from this income group.”

Notably, Senate Democrats shot down an amendment sponsored by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) to the Inflation Reduction Act that would have barred the IRS from targeting working-class Americans with the IRS’s increased funding.

Crapo, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in reaction to the IRS filing pilot project last week:

Having the IRS act as tax preparer, tax collector and tax enforcer raises significant conflicts of interest, would incur billions of dollars in development, and would expose exponentially more taxpayer information to misuse or abuse, providing hackers and identity thieves yet another IRS outlet to exploit.  Despite tax preparers providing tens of millions of free returns a year and having a fully functional Free File program at virtually no cost to taxpayers, the federal government entering into the software tax preparation business is an unnecessary expense that will only add to an out-of-control deficit.  There are also significant questions as to whether the IRS has the legal authority to implement such a program without congressional authorization.

More than two dozen conservative and free-market-oriented groups sent a letter to Congress, urging them to oppose the creation of a government-run tax preparation service. They wrote:

Private tax preparation companies, in contrast, have a financial incentive to minimize the amount of taxes their clients owe, and are therefore more likely to provide taxpayers with impartial and accurate advice. Congress should resist any effort that would empower the IRS to simultaneously act as tax preparer, collector, and auditor.

The conservatives added, “The IRS should not take on new responsibilities, including running tax preparation for the country, while it fails to complete the basic responsibilities Congress has already assigned to it.”