At today's House Oversight Committee hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) brought out quotes of House Republicans discussing their dysfunction.
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00:00 recognizes Mr. Raskin.
00:03 Thank you, Chair McClain, for calling the hearing, and also Ms. Porter and Mr. Mfume
00:08 for their thoughtful remarks today.
00:10 Look, the American people want a tax system that is simpler, fairer, and more responsive.
00:19 And I wish that we could have hearings on each of those. I mean, just to take a look
00:23 at simplicity, for example, I have lived in foreign countries where they don't have a
00:29 multibillion-dollar business in H&R Block, and all of these companies that are trying
00:34 to help people understand their taxes. And most people's taxes, you know, 90 percent
00:38 of people's taxes could be done in 15 minutes or 20 minutes, which is what it's like in
00:44 countries around the world. We should be having a hearing about why we have a $10 billion
00:49 a year-plus business in helping people do what the government should be helping them
00:54 do instead.
00:56 But what we've got is one more hearing to beat up on the IRS as part of the program
01:01 to deconstruct the administrative state, as Steve Bannon promised at the beginning of
01:07 the Trump administration, and we're right in the throes of it. One can only regard with
01:11 amazement that any member of the Republican Party today would lecture the commissioner
01:18 of the IRS about efficiency or organization or anything else.
01:23 Look at what the Republicans are saying about the Republicans today on Capitol Hill as we
01:29 live through all of the reverberations of the chaos caucus. So, the world is burning
01:38 around us. We're fiddling. We don't have a strategy. That's Representative Steve Womack,
01:44 Republican from Louisiana. We're fractured, says a member of this committee, Representative
01:49 Anna Luna from Florida. It's not a normal majority, says Representative Tom Cole, Republican
01:55 of Oklahoma. Here's Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about the Republicans.
02:00 This conference is absolutely broken. Here's Kevin McCarthy, who used to be Speaker before
02:07 he was deposed by the Republicans. This is embarrassing for the Republican Party. It's
02:12 embarrassing for the nation. Here's Representative David Joyce from Ohio, who probably sums it
02:17 up best. We're a party that can't govern. Here's Representative Troy Neils from Texas.
02:24 We're a broken conference. Representative Tom Emmer said if it were a family, quote,
02:30 we'd be the most dysfunctional family on the face of the planet. Here's Representative
02:35 Austin Scott, who ran briefly for Speaker in the Speakership sweepstakes taking place
02:41 right now. It makes us look like a bunch of idiots. And Representative Mark Alford from
02:46 Michigan, another Republican. We are a ship that doesn't have a rudder right now. So it
02:52 would be great if we could actually get a Speaker of the House and a functioning House
02:57 of Representatives so we could deal with these issues. Now, the implementation of the IRA
03:04 shows that providing adequate resources to the IRS dramatically improves services to
03:10 our people and the effectiveness of the overall mission. In the 2023 filing season, IRA investments
03:18 allowed the IRS to create and adopt digital tools to process tax returns more efficiently.
03:24 The agency greatly improved in-person service, service over the telephone, and online customer
03:32 service. But we know a lot more needs to be done. I have a constituent who came in to
03:37 see us in August. He and his wife had filed their taxes in April. They got their refund
03:44 from the state of Maryland in two weeks. After five months and multiple attempts to get the
03:50 IRS to send their tax refund, they still couldn't get it. They reached out to my office in desperation,
03:56 and we were able to work with the taxpayer advocate to make it happen. But nobody should
04:00 have to go through that experience of bureaucratic lethargy and frustration like that. But we
04:06 know that you're making improvements. It's moving in the right direction, but you're
04:09 writing against a background of decades of deliberate underinvestment. Well, the IRA
04:16 is also making the administration tax system more equitable. You're hiring experts who
04:20 can audit and enforce tax laws against big corporations and ultra-wealthy filers who've
04:26 been able to get away with a lot before that. Commissioner Werfel, how has the IRA allowed
04:33 IRS to crack down on tax cheats? Is the investment the American people have made paying off in
04:39 terms of the money we're getting back? It is, Ranking Member Raskin, it absolutely is.
04:47 We are putting the money to work today to take a variety of different steps. We're increasing
04:55 the number of audits on our largest corporations using analytics that we've invested in to
05:01 make sure that we select the right corporations that are the highest risk of shielding income
05:06 inappropriately. We've increased the number of audits on complex partnerships, something
05:11 that GAO has pointed out, how anemic our partnership audit rate is. And again, we're using invested
05:18 new tools and analytics to make sure that we're understanding the types of trends necessary
05:24 to know where those complex partnerships are that are actually evading taxes, so we improve
05:30 the efficiency of our audit. And as mentioned earlier, we've launched an effort to get back
05:35 taxes from millionaires and billionaires, and we've identified 1,600 high-priority targets,
05:42 if you will, of millionaires and billionaires, and we've already collected in the early months
05:46 over $100 million in back taxes. All of that is IRA money being put to work. And as you
05:52 mentioned, on the services side, we have a lot of work to do. Building block by building
05:57 block, we are making changes to our services to make that story that you told a thing of
06:02 the past.
06:03 Thank you very much. I yield back, Madam Chair.
06:05 Thank you. The chair now recognizes