President Donald Trump is holding true to his promise to drain the swamp, and he’s doing it at lightning-fast speed. In conjunction with Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), President Trump is looking under the hood at federal agencies that have been working against American taxpayers and businesses, rather than for them. One agency, above all, should be thoroughly examined for its assault on businesses during the Biden Administration – the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the already-bloated agency was pumped with an additional $80 billion, which was supposed to help the IRS modernize its systems. In reality, career bureaucrats have utilized these funds to overstep their legal authority and target business owners – America’s job creators.
Just three months before President Trump took office, a new “special pass-throughs” unit began its work to scrutinize the lawful “basis-shifting” transactions implemented by businesses operating under a partnership model. And in the waning days of the Biden Administration, they implemented a rule to create brand-new reporting requirements, including a six-year look-back examination of all transactions—an onerous, unnecessary burden on business owners across Kansas and the whole country, threatening huge penalties for non-compliance. Businesses of all sizes engage in these routine transactions to deploy capital and drive beneficial economic growth. This rule “would deliberately embed uncertainty and subjective IRS interpretations of how taxable assets are treated when one transfers or sells their interest in a business partnership,” highlighted Stephen Moore of The Heritage Foundation.
Even if you aren’t a business owner yourself, you should be concerned about the weaponization of the IRS. Americans have felt the impact of inflation from misguided policy for the past four years, and if this rule isn’t rescinded and the investigatory unit immediately disbanded, it will have a chilling effect on economic activity in Kansas. Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council President and CEO Karen Kerrigan noted that as businesses expend funds and bandwidth to remain compliant, the impact of these targeted efforts will go “further as these costs will be passed down to consumers, which is certainly not needed right now given volatile inflation and high prices for consumer goods and services.”
Why we’re not getting our money’s worth from the IRS
As Chair of the Kansas House Financial Institutions and Pensions Committee, I have worked to ensure capital is more readily available to small businesses so they can invest, expand, and create jobs. But overreaching IRS policies threaten to undermine that progress, deterring entrepreneurs from taking the necessary risks to grow their operations. President Trump was elected to rein in bureaucracy and bring order to a corrupt, bloated federal government. I campaigned on being a champion for Kansans and have set out to work with our congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., to ensure we are supporting President Trump’s cost-cutting agenda. Senator Roger Marshall and Representative Ron Estes have key roles on the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees, respectively. Therefore, I urge them to raise the IRS targeting of business partnerships with the DOGE team, as well as President Trump, to make certain the investigatory enforcement unit is at the top of the list for review and, ultimately, elimination. We are entering the golden age of America and cannot have holdover Biden Administration bureaucrats and unnecessary rules stifling our economic engine.
Kansas Representative Nick Hoheisel – Special To The Infomrer
Nick Hoheisel is a Republican representing the 97th District in the Kansas House of Representatives. He chairs the Financial Institutions and Pensions Committee.
