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You name it, the Biden Administration has done it to urge Americans to vote for Democrats this year. And now maybe the Internal Revenue Service is lending a hand.
In October the IRS extended the window for some people to file a 2021 tax return by a month to Nov. 17. It’s also sending letters to some nine million Americans who it says “appear to qualify for a variety of key tax benefits” but didn’t claim them. Specifically, the IRS is reminding recipients that they should claim the child tax credit, recovery rebate credit and the earned-income tax credit (EITC).
All three benefits, the IRS reminds, were “expanded under last year’s American Rescue Plan Act.” That bill provided $1,400 checks to millions of households. It expanded the child tax credit to $3,000 or $3,600 per child (depending on age) and made it fully refundable, which means you get it even if you have no tax liability. And it increased the EITC for childless adults by 175%, to $1,502 a person.
It isn’t clear how the IRS came up with the names of those who received this missive, though the press release says Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis identified individuals who don’t normally have to file an income-tax form “because they appear to have very low incomes.” The IRS release suggests this is routine, noting it sent out a “similar” reminder in 2020.
But in a letter last week to IRS Commissioner
Charles Rettig,
House Ways and Means ranking Republican
Kevin Brady
(Texas) called out the “suspicious timing” of these letters before an election, which “appears political.” He explains that 2020 was handled very differently.
The IRS sent a letter in September 2020 solely to remind people about the October filing deadline—but it did not include an extension. The 2020 letter referred only to stimulus checks—not the child tax credit or EITC (both of which are now featured in Democratic campaigns).
Mr. Brady wants more information on how recipients were identified, given the IRS acknowledges that it is guessing about who might qualify. And he’s asking why the IRS is soliciting more tax returns, when it is still sitting on more than nine million unprocessed 2021 returns, part of 18 million returns awaiting an IRS response of one kind or another. The IRS has a long history of improper payments for programs like EITC, estimated to have cost taxpayers $16 billion in fiscal 2020.
Perhaps the IRS’s new letter is nothing more than what it calls an “ongoing effort” to make credit recipients more aware. But the timing and message sound suspiciously like a campaign advertisement for Democrats.
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