IRS requests nearly $500 million more in funding to implement Obamacare
The IRS on Tuesday told Congress it would like an additional $490.4 million in the next fiscal year to implement the Affordable Care Act, also known as the ACA or Obamacare.
“This additional funding, the majority of which is for required information technology upgrades, will allow the IRS to increase efforts to ensure compliance with a number of tax-related provisions of the ACA, including the premium tax credit and individual shared responsibility provision,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in prepared remarks to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday. “The funding will provide enhanced technology infrastructure and applications support, and allow necessary, major modifications to existing IRS tax administration systems.”
“A portion of the funding also addresses new audit requirements related to the employer shared responsibility provision,” he added.
The Obama administration has clearly repeated that tax returns were being delayed due to Obamacare as “the IRS is charged with assessing people’s actual income at the end of the year to see whether they received the right amount of subsidy. In many cases, people are discovering they have to repay some of the subsidies they received,” noted The Blaze.
The Blaze added that :
Koskinen delivered the news that the IRS needs more Obamacare funding as part of a statement that said the IRS overall is starved for funds, and needs $2 billion more to do it’s job the way it wants to do it. Koskinen said IRS funding has been cut by $1.2 billion over the last 5 years, and that it’s funding level is now $10.9 billion in the current fiscal year.
“The IRS is now at its lowest level of funding since FY 2008,” he said in his prepared testimony. “When inflation is taken into account, the current funding level is comparable to that of 1998.”
The IRS has seen cuts over the last few years as House Republicans as slashed funds for the agency, even operating with $346 million less than what it had the year before.
Koskinen said $1.3 billion of the $2 billion it wants would help the IRS “make strategic investments to continue modernizing our systems, improving service to taxpayers, and reduce the deficit through more effective enforcement and administration of tax laws.”
That includes hiring more auditors and spending money on information technology.
[* Shield plugin marked this comment as “trash”. Reason: Failed GASP Bot Filter Test (checkbox) *]
[…] IRS requests nearly $500 million more in funding to implement Obamacare […]