Exclusive — Sen. Joni Ernst: ‘I Want to Audit the IRS’ to Expose 1,250 Agents Who ‘Aren’t Paying Their Own Taxes’

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) called for an audit of the IRS on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow while referencing a 2019 report published by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration identifying 1,250 cases of agency employees failing to comply with federal income tax regulations.

“Democrats want to audit Americans, and I want to audit the IRS,” Ernst said. “There was an IG report that came out that said 1,250 IRS employees were identified to have not paid their tax bill in full or on time, and more than 300 of these folks were repeat offenders. So these are tax cheats inside the IRS — they’re IRS agents, they’re revenue officers, even a criminal investigator.”

Ernst referenced a government projection of the IRS hiring 86,852 full-time employees by 2031 via funding from the Biden administration’s proposed American Families Plan.

“We have all these folks in the IRS that aren’t paying their own taxes, and yet the Democrats want to hire more of them to go after hard-working Americans,” Ernst stated. “Let’s focus on the IRS before we start going after Americans that are just trying to make ends meet.”

“We want to bring awareness to the situation that within their own agency, they have people that are not paying their taxes. Let’s look internally. Let’s make sure we’re collecting the taxes that are due from the actual IRS employees, and then they can move on. I think those 87,000 people — instead of hiring them for the IRS — they should have been hired to secure our southern border. They should have been hired to work the backlog of VA claims for our veterans. There are so many other ways that we can bolster our federal government without hiring new IRS agents.”

In a letter to Russel George, inspector general for tax administration, Ernst wrote, “Innocent, hardworking Americans should not be subjected to unfair and costly IRS audits when the agency is ignoring tax cheats on its own payroll.”