U.S. Sen. Rick Scott is continuing his crusade against new hires by the Internal Revenue Service, contending they will be used to pester his family and others.
“They have 87,000 more IRS agents, so they’re just going to go out to go and harass all of our families,” Scott complained. “This is wrong.”
Scott made the comments this weekend after his speech at the National Conservatism Convention, in a friendly interview with the right-of-center One America News Network, part of comments about what the interviewer called the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement Scott discussed in his speech.
Scott’s assertion agents would harass the families of Scott and others went unchallenged in his interview.
Scott has messaged heavily against the workforce additions at the IRS, including a letter telling people there is no point in applying to join the “IRS super police force” because Republicans would defund them.
“We aren’t talking about joining your local police force, or even the U.S. military — this is the federal agency charged with collecting taxes. The IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them,” Scott alleged, in a letter from his Senate Office.
PolitiFact has evaluated this and related claims from Scott as “mostly false.”
While most media outlets have not challenged Scott’s assertions about IRS intentions, he did face adversarial questioning recently on the topic.
During a Sept. 9 appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box, after Scott first suggested it was pointless to go after “rich people” because “they’ve hired all their lawyers and are trying to follow the rules already,” he was pressed on the incongruity of taking “law-and-order” positions on other issues, but not on tax enforcement.
“The IRS right now doesn’t answer the phone hardly at all. They haven’t used technology the way they should’ve. Why don’t they start fixing some of their problems?” Scott said.
“You’ll have some issue over moving expenses or something like this, and they’ll have 10 or 15 people in there harassing the daylights out of you,” Scott asserted, before going on to say that the IRS targeted “conservative groups and Tea Party groups” while ignoring the evidence provided that the IRS needs some upgrades to function.
IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig paints a picture of incremental change at the agency, meanwhile.
“The IRS has struggled for many years with insufficient resources to fulfill our important mission. During the next 10 years, these funds will help us in many areas, including adding critical resources to not just close the tax gap but meaningfully improve taxpayer service and technology. This will allow the IRS to provide services to taxpayers in the manner they expect and deserve,” Rettig wrote in August.
The post In latest IRS bash, Rick Scott claims new agents will ‘harass our families’ appeared first on Florida Politics - Campaigns & Elections. Lobbying & Government..
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