As you may have heard, the Inflation Reduction Act, the legislation signed into law by President Joe Biden earlier month, mandates $80 billion in new funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). 

Opponents of the funding have painted a picture of this expenditure as funding “87,000 new IRS agents,” or perhaps “87,000 new armed IRS agents,” or even “Biden’s army” of IRS agents. But this is not the case. 

The legislation does not specify how many people the IRS will be hiring, while the 87,000 figure comes from a nonbinding study showing how many new hires the IRS might be able to make if they got their desired funding. However, only a fraction of that amount of hires would be “agents,” and among the agents, an even smaller fraction would be “armed.” Plus, the new hires would likely take place over ten years with many of them balancing out attrition from IRS employees who have retired or will in the coming years. 

So what will the IRS spend the money on? Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen addressed that last week, as reported by CNBC. 

“The Inflation Reduction Act provides the IRS what it has needed for years—a stable stream of mandatory funding that will allow the agency to serve American taxpayers the way they deserve,” Yellen wrote in a memo to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, the report said. 

The new funding will help enforce tax laws for “high net-worth individuals, large corporations and complex partnerships who today pay far less than they owe,” with the increased enforcement listed as one of the “pay-fors” for the new legislation. 

The story also listed four priorities for the $80 billion in new IRS funding. These include clearing the agency’s large backlog of unprocessed returns, improving the IRS’ customer service, overhauling the agency’s “decades out of date” tech infrastructure, and adding new hires, aimed at prefacing the 50,000 agency workers who are expected to retire in the next decade. 

“This operational plan is key to ensuring the public and Congress are able to hold the agency accountable as it pursues needed improvements,” Yellen said in the memo to Rettig, CNBC said.

The agency’s technological capabilities have previously been described as the oldest in the entire federal government. 

The Treasury secretary also instructed the IRS commissioner to not use any of the additional funding resources on auditing small businesses or middle and working-class Americans. 

“Specifically, I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Yellen said in the memo, per CNBC. 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.