Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com.

Senator Joni Ernst calls herself the U.S. Senate’s “fiercest advocate” for government accountability.

Too bad she doesn’t appear to care about the country’s biggest tax cheats.

Over the past couple years, the Iowa senator has been fixated on the Internal Revenue Service. But rather than help the IRS try to recover the hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes each year, Ernst and her fellow Republicans are doing the opposite. They want to choke off the funding that is helping the IRS to rein in these abuses and give you better service.

Three weeks ago, the IRS announced that, with the additional funding provided by the White House and Democrats in Congress, it had collected more than $1 billion in unpaid taxes from millionaires over the past year.

The month before that, the agency announced it was closing a loophole to stop “basis shifting” among related partnerships that could cost taxpayers $50 billion over the next 10 years.

You would think a lawmaker who cares about the budget would praise this sort of thing. After all, tax collections are vital to maintaining a sound budget, and our nation’s fiscal health isn’t good. We just learned the federal debt blasted past $35 trillion for the first time. That’s almost twice the red ink we had in 2014, when Ernst was first elected.

To be sure, shrinking the amount of unpaid taxes won’t solve the nation’s debt problem. And the IRS announcements I just mentioned only make a small dent in the annual amount of unpaid taxes, which the government estimated was about $625 billion in 2021.

Still, Americans who pay their taxes expect their fellow citizens to pay their fair share, too. And they expect the government to enforce the rules fairly.

So, what is Ernst doing to help?

Not much. Not only is she critical of the additional funding that makes these gains possible, but now she’s bragging about a new audit she requested in 2022, which studied how IRS workers are complying with their tax obligations.

The audit, conducted by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, found that, as of May 2023, 96 percent of IRS employees were current on the taxes they owed. Four percent were not.

About 2,000 workers—out of 85,000 total—owed $12 million, or about $6,000 apiece on average. Another 1,300 IRS workers owed $9 million and were on payment plans, which are available to any qualified taxpayer having trouble with their bills. Add in the private employees working for IRS contractors, and the total back taxes owed was $46 million, according to the audit.

Nobody likes it when other people don’t pay their taxes on time, but if this is what Ernst defines as “massive tax evasion,” she should look instead at the 2021 TIGTA audit that called attention to the 685,000 wealthy taxpayers who were delinquent on $38.5 billion in tax obligations.

That’s more than 1,800 times the back taxes owed by those IRS employees.

In fact, an audit last year found IRS employees consistently have the lowest tax delinquency rate in the federal government. And while it’s not a direct comparison, the government estimates that 85 percent of tax obligations owed by Americans overall are paid voluntarily and on time.

The IRS said in response to the audit that more than half of those workers who were delinquent but not on payment plans had already paid up or were owed refunds. That’s a good thing. Not only should everybody pay their taxes, but the law imposes a special obligation on IRS employees to do so. They are, after all, working for the agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s tax laws.

But what about the people who write those laws?

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that members of Congress are following those tax laws, too?

Unfortunately, we can’t be sure. Even if they are audited, we aren’t told about it. And when the media asks for their tax returns, they often get stiff-armed. In 2017, amid the controversy over Donald Trump’s tax returns, Roll Call asked the more than 500 members of Congress to release their returns. Only six did so. (Roll Call also identified an additional 43 lawmakers who had released their returns, apparently to others, or allowed reporters to view them.) 

If Ernst really wanted to be a “fierce advocate” for government accountability, she would demand that more than 10 percent of her fellow lawmakers publicly release their tax returns.

Or she might shine a light on the thousands of private companies with government contracts that still owe hundreds of millions of dollars in delinquent taxes.

Or she might insist that those wealthy Americans who are dodging billions of dollars in taxes pay their fair share. 

Here’s the point: The IRS isn’t the enemy here. It is just a convenient scapegoat for a senator who has no apparent interest in working to ensure the nation’s tax collector has the resources to adequately do the job of making sure that everybody pays the taxes they owe.

This shouldn’t be surprising. In the nearly ten years that Ernst has been in federal office, the nation’s fiscal health has significantly deteriorated. Spending has risen. Debt has risen. The amount of unpaid taxes has risen.

The U.S. has serious fiscal challenges, but it appears Ernst will never be a part of solving them. She’s too busy playing games.

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Top photo: Senator Joni Ernst speaks at a news conference expressing support for Israel on July 24, 2024. First published on the senator’s official Facebook page.