President Obama and House Republicans are brawling over the IRS budget in a pitched fight that raises an issue few have paid attention to – the IRS is getting mighty big. 

It is no secret that President Obama is a big fan of the IRS. He’s been bumping up the Agencies budget each year with a 10 percent increase being phased in the last year. The purpose of the increases is primarily to increase the number of auditors to go after taxpayers. There is a certain irony to this given the fact many of the members of President Obama’s staff have had, shall we say, a dodgy tax history! 

President Obama is now proposing a further budgetary increase of over a billion dollars for the 2012 period. This would be used to increase auditing staff by about 5,100 positions. Hey, he promised job creation! This would give the Agency a total budget of just about $12.5 billion a year. 

House Republicans are, of course, feeling their oats after the midterm elections. They view the efforts to turn the IRS into a Big Brother as a bad move. This is particularly true since the IRS will be charged with enforcing much of the healthcare law that was passed so contentiously.  In response, the House of Representatives passed a budget that CUT the IRS budget by $600 million. That is a rather major difference!

What will happen? This being politics, we’ll eventually see a compromise and one that will fall more in line with the President’s wishes. How do we know this? Well, Republicans have shown a certain fondness for spending taxpayers money just like Democrats. To do this when they are fully back in power, they will need the IRS to be at full power. Given this, there will be much squawking and then the IRS will be given a nice budget increase that it will use to harass Americans with in an effort to find more money for the government.