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Trump team under fire for delaying IRS report on the impact of his tax cuts: ‘I think they’re hiding stuff’

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Trump team under fire for delaying IRS report on the impact of his tax cuts: ‘I think they’re hiding stuff’

Data from missing reports under IRS chief Frank Bisignano could be embarrassing to Republicans running on Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill

IRS chief denies report that he spied on colleagues at JP Morgan
Related: IRS chief denies report that he spied on colleagues at JP Morgan

Donald Trump’s administration appears to be withholding critical data that is expected to show the sweeping impacts of the president’s massive domestic spending bill that analysts say has increased taxes and household costs for Americans from virtually every economic background.

IRS data is typically released after each filing season, but the administration has delayed the publication of this year’s report that would provide the first detailed look into the impacts of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — and may reveal the agency’s failures to audit wealthy households.

The report is currently listed on the IRS website as “pending.” That data was supposed to be published in July and updated in September. Neither has happened, and the IRS is waiting for the Treasury Department to sign off on the release, according to Politico.

Those details could be embarrassing for congressional Republicans while the White House tries to convince voters in the days before midterm elections that his signature piece of legislation was a success — with the balance of power in Congress and fate of Trump’s final two years in office at stake.

“I think they are hiding stuff that doesn’t line up with all the crowing the CEO has been doing,” Center for Taxpayer Rights executive director Nina Olsen told Politico about Trump’s IRS chief Frank Bisignano.

Missing IRS reports under chief Frank Bisignano could be embarrassing to congressional Republicans running on Trump’s message of economic success, experts say
Missing IRS reports under chief Frank Bisignano could be embarrassing to congressional Republicans running on Trump’s message of economic success, experts say (AFP/Getty)

A recent analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy determined that the One Big Beautiful Bill “overwhelmingly benefits the rich and corporations.”

Alleged benefits to middle-class households, including the president’s “no tax on tips” mantra, represent only “a very small portion of the overall legislation which overwhelmingly benefits high-income people and corporations,” according to the report.

Massive corporations including Meta, Amazon, Google and Tesla “have paid extremely low effective tax rates” — from 0 percent to 8 percent — “in large part” due to Trump’s bill, the report found.

The president’s chief economic policy has largely hiked taxes and consumer costs for low- and middle-income households while cutting them for the top 1 percent, according to the report, which was published October 8.

“The tax cuts Americans were promised — which were tilted heavily to the top to start — are being overwhelmed by higher prices and higher health care costs for most families,” according to Steve Wamhoff, the group’s federal policy director and the author of the report.

“When you look at the full picture rather than tax cuts in isolation, the result is striking: the typical American in every income group is paying more, except that the richest 1 percent is the one group that comes out ahead,” he said.

The IRS has already come under fire for missing data about the ‘tax cap’ that should shot how much tax goes uncollected after the Treasury Department’s inspector general found that audits plunged by more than a third
The IRS has already come under fire for missing data about the ‘tax cap’ that should shot how much tax goes uncollected after the Treasury Department’s inspector general found that audits plunged by more than a third (AFP/Getty)

The IRS has already come under fire for withholding the report’s estimate of unpaid taxes, an estimate of the so-called “tax gap” that reveals how much tax goes uncollected each year.

The agency’s most recent projection estimated that roughly $700 billion in owed taxes went uncollected in 2022. The estimate for 2023 was never released, let alone the reports for 2024, 2025 and 2026.

This summer, the Treasury Department’s inspector general found that revenue collected from audits dropped by more than a third over the last fiscal year, suggesting that the tax gap is likely growing under Trump.

That drop coincided with a 27 percent cut in enforcement and collection staffing at the IRS under Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

“The downstream effects of these reductions are likely to become more apparent over time,” the inspector general wrote.

A blackout in IRS data also follows a wider pattern of missing data across the Trump administration, which has either stopped collecting or publishing critical information for dozens of federal datasets.

The administration has been accused of withholding, altering, or removing altogether data findings that have not aligned with the president’s agenda, including budget figures for the war in Iran, air quality reports, CDC surveys, and other key data points used to inform policy and public health.

Trump also fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics last year after calling labor market data “rigged.”

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Source: Alex Woodward · www.independent.co.uk