During a Senate Finance Committee hearing last week, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the IRS.
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00:00Senator Barrasso. Well, thanks so much Mr. Chairman and congratulations on this
00:04nomination. I'm talking about weaponizing the IRS. I think we saw that the last four
00:08years by the Biden administration and best different groups and church groups
00:12parents all sorts of things the IRS was weaponized and I'm just going to ask you
00:16about restoring the credibility of the IRS which I thought lost a lot of
00:19credibility during the last four years under Joe Biden and the Democrat
00:22control. So I think very few agencies in Washington are as present in the lives
00:27of working families as the IRS is. When you came to visit with me I told you
00:32my concerns and the concerns of the people of Wyoming that the IRS is the
00:35most powerful but yet what we've seen in the past the least accountable of the
00:40agencies of the government. So under the Biden administration the presence really
00:44shifted from helping people understand our taxes to presuming everybody was
00:48breaking the law that we were all a bunch of crooks. They wanted to add what was
00:51there 87,000 IRS agents to shake down small businesses because they even the
00:55Congressional Budget Office said yeah if you had all these more IRS agents then
00:59they're going to bring in that much more money because they're going to be out
01:01there auditing small businesses and going after families and you know in
01:05Wyoming I regularly hear from folks they're just concerned about any
01:08dealings they have with the IRS and if they don't hear from them that's better
01:11because these are honest taxpayers they want to pay what they owe they want to
01:15make sure that when they have a question they can get an answer and I think too
01:20often if they call the IRS repeatedly they're unable to get anybody to answer the phone
01:23or helping them comply or saying yeah this is a number you can rely on and you
01:28pay this and it's fair so you know the IRS's audit notices don't seem to be
01:35delayed but their answers seem to be delayed but you know this hiring of
01:40thousands of new agents to investigate taxpayers really I think set the IRS even
01:45further away from the American people in terms of an agency that they trust so you
01:49know if confirmed you could just talk a little bit about how you hope to restore
01:52the credibility of the IRS with the American people I and thank you for the
01:57question thank you for the time in your office you know that my wife and her
02:00family have deep ties that's where she was raised out there in Wyoming and but I
02:07think that I'm my three most important things the IRS for fairness fairness and
02:13fairness I think you have to be fairness to fair to the taxpayers but you also
02:16have to have your employee partners that are gonna work with them and not be
02:21intimidated by one or the other and when you talk about calling the IRS and
02:25getting information I mentioned earlier when I did talk radio for six years there
02:30wasn't a week that went by that I didn't say you could call the IRS five days a
02:33week with the same question to get six different answers and unfortunately that
02:38happens still today I've I don't know how to prepare for something like this I
02:43mean my thought was go back and watch old commissioner hearings Senate you know for
02:48Senate approval of people that were nominated to be commissioner of the IRS
02:52because I thought that it was important to kind of in it's the same thing over and
02:57over and over for all these years whether it's technology whether it's
03:01taxpayer fairness overhanded heavy-handed investigations of people and let's bring
03:08back common sense as I told I think it was a senator young a while ago that let's
03:15bring back common sense to the IRS and stay in constant communication with the
03:20senators offices with Congress's office and when I just left Congress two and a
03:25half years ago I want people in my office to be able to set in with you all
03:30when you're developing these laws so once it's done you don't have to spend six
03:34or ten twelve months deciding what it meant because that's what a lot of these
03:38problems are today that we've been discussing or something goes over to the IRS and it
03:42takes them forever to put out guidance on it and it's kind of like the king's
03:46horsemen roll into town and they jump off the horse and they roll out the scroll
03:49and this is this week's edicts and they roll it back up and go out of town come
03:53back three weeks later and roll out another scroll with this week's edict that
03:57they're deciding over there so I think communication is number one and I've
04:01always been a pretty good communicator and I want to have a very open-door
04:06policy and I we were talking about Charles Rossetti earlier and he said the
04:11first thing he did at the IRS he went down there and all the doors were solid
04:15you can see but in their office he said go get me a stopper rubber stopper and he
04:21propped his door open from that day on so that people could have accessibility to
04:25him and get in I'm going to improve on Charles the system I'm going to have
04:29anybody that wants to know my schedule every morning for 90 minutes before the
04:32place opens to hear their concerns to hear how we can treat taxpayers better not
04:36be heavy-handed we got to collect what do we collect 96% of the income in this
04:41country through the IRS so it's a pretty important agency and I know that you
04:46know the position I am it's you know not what everybody aspires to be but through
04:53my years on the radio and everything all the issues that I knew people had with
04:57the IRS and when I was at Congress for 12 years that was a large part of our
05:01constituent services let me have one last question and it's on protecting
05:04taxpayer data and people are very concerned about their own private
05:08information last answer you said you'd worked on the word intimidation people
05:12feel intimidated and especially their worry is that their data may get out
05:15their information that they don't want shared with anybody and it's because of
05:18some hacking or something has in the IRS could you talk a little bit about that
05:21yeah I think that you know it's vitally important 6103 is the longest section in
05:26the IRS code and I think we have to bend over backwards do everything we can
05:30possibly do to protect that data thank you thank you mr. chairman