WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal’s (AFL) Center for Legal Equality launched an investigation of the Biden Administration’s illegal plans for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make race-based tax audit and enforcement decisions.  

Congress has prohibited the IRS from collecting race and ethnicity data from American taxpayers. But since President Biden took office, the Treasury Department has been using “racial equity” as a “key factor in the design of tax compliance,” and illegally “examining the tax system through a racial equity lens.” Statements by Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo, Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Lily Batchelder, and members of the “Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity [sic]” demonstrate that the Treasury Department is committed to imputing race and ethnicity into tax data for the purpose of ensuring that more white, Asian, and mixed-race Americans are audited based solely on their race or national origin. 

Furthermore, President Biden’s February 16, 2023, Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government directs agencies to “prevent and remedy discrimination, including by protecting the public from algorithmic discrimination [sic]”. Consequently, there is very strong reason to believe that the Treasury Department is altering the IRS’s audit algorithms to illegally operationalize racial quotas and/or requiring agents to use imputed race and ethnicity data to ensure “racial equity.” 

This, of course, also comes in the context of the last Congress providing enough funding to the IRS to add an additional 87,000 IRS agents. And it also comes in the context of the IRS leaking confidential taxpayer information about thousands of Americans to ProPublica. And now, the IRS appears to be preparing to make enforcement decisions based on race. 

America First Legal, through its Center for Legal Equality, will continue fighting relentlessly to stop the Biden Administration’s radical, racist, and illegal “equity” plans to protect the equality and dignity of every American citizen.

Statement from Gene Hamilton, America First Legal Vice-President and General Counsel:

“The notion that race should play any role whatsoever in the IRS’s operations is absurd, offensive to the American ideal, and illegal. But the Biden Administration is so blinded by its relentless obsession with race that it is willing to make IRS enforcement decisions based on the race of American citizens. We will fight their attempts to erode equality under the law and expose their attempts to inject toxic ‘equity’-based policies throughout the federal government,” said Gene Hamilton.

Read the FOIA here.

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