Democrats’ newest health care and climate spending bill includes an $80 billion boost to Internal Revenue Service which is intended to help the agency fight wealthy tax cheats. But Republican critics say a bigger IRS could ultimately hurt lower-income Americans. Providing the IRS with an influx of funding has been a top priority for President Biden. He has emerged as one of the most prominent sponsors of the anti-inflation bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, DW.Va., introduced last week. Democrats have predicted that boosting IRS funding could add an additional $124 billion in federal revenue over the next decade by hiring more tax officials who can crack down on tax evasion by wealthy individuals and corporations. About $1 trillion in federal taxes goes unpaid annually because of errors, fraud and a lack of resources to adequately enforce collections, according to an estimate by IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig last year. But GOP lawmakers are sounding alarm bells about the proposal, warning it could have serious consequences for lower-income workers. DEMOCRAFT MINIMUM CORPORATE TAX WOULD HIT THESE INDUSTRIES HARDEST The headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, DC, February 25, 2022. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images) That’s because the IRS disproportionately targets low-income Americans when it conducts tax audits each year. In fact, households earning less than $25,000 are five times more likely to be audited by the agency than everyone else, according to a recent analysis of tax data from fiscal year 2021 by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at the University of of Syracuse. The reason for this is an increase in what are known as “mail audits,” meaning the IRS conducts audits of tax returns via letters or phone calls instead of more complex face-to-face audits. Only a fraction – 100,000 of the 659,000 checks in 2021 – were carried out in person. According to the Syracuse study, more than half of the mail audits the IRS initiated last year — 54 percent — involved low-income workers with gross receipts of less than $25,000 who claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit, an anti-poverty measure. Even taxpayers with total positive income ranging from $200,000 to $1 million were one-third as likely to be audited by the IRS compared to wage earners with the lowest income. About 9 million taxpayers reported these high income levels in 2021, but fewer than 40,000 of their returns were audited, or about 4.5 in 1,000. That’s in sharp contrast to lower-income Americans, who faced a screening rate of 13 in 1,000. Sen. Joe Manchin, DW.Va., left, talks with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., before a ceremony where President Joe Biden signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, March 15, 2022, in Washington , DC (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/Getty Images) STRATEGISTS, TAX OFFICERS WEIGH BILL’S IMPACTS ON MID-TERM ELECTIONS The discrepancy is mainly because high-income taxpayers have complex investments that can easily cover the gaps between taxes owed and paid versus taxes declared and paid. “Barring an unlikely major change in the composition of IRS enforcement, enhanced IRS enforcement will subject taxpayers across the income spectrum to greater scrutiny and greater audit risk,” the right-wing Heritage Foundation said in a recent blog post. The Heritage Foundation noted that most IRS individual audit examinations target taxpayers who report less than $50,000 in adjusted gross income. Although this group earns significantly less income than others, it faced IRS-recommended tax adjustments of about $3.4 billion in fiscal year 2010. That compares with about $3.7 billion for those Americans who reported more than $50,000. President Joe Biden speaks about the economy and the final rule implementing the Special Financial Assistance program, which protects multiemployer pension plans, at Max S. Hayes High School in Cleveland, Ohio, July 6, 2022. (Saul Loeb/ AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images) The IRS has said it will not increase audits on households earning less than $400,000 if the $80 billion in funding is approved. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT FOX BUSINESS “These resources are absolutely not about auditing small businesses or middle-income Americans,” Retting, the IRS commissioner, wrote in a letter to lawmakers Thursday. “As planned, our investment in these enforcement resources is designed in line with the Treasury’s guidance that audit rates will not increase over recent years for households making less than $400,000.”