(TheIndependentStar.com) – In one of her most overly hypocritical moves, Vice President Kamala Harris has now plagiarized Donald Trump’s campaign promise to nix taxes on tips if elected president even though she previously cast a tie-breaking vote in favor of allowing the IRS to track workers’ tips for taxation.
Harris, who recently echoed a campaign pledge initially made by former President Donald Trump to abolish taxes on tips, cast a pivotal vote in 2022 that facilitated IRS scrutiny of workers’ tipped income for tax purposes.
On August 7, 2022, Harris used her tie-breaking vote to enact the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated an additional $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Breitbart News notes in a report.
This infusion of funds empowered the IRS to intensify its oversight of how the service industry reports tips for tax purposes.
Harris’s Facebook account commemorated this event on its two-year anniversary, stating, “Two years ago today, I proudly cast the tie-breaking vote to pass our Inflation Reduction Act,” alongside a video clip of her casting this significant vote.
During the legislative session captured in the video, Harris announced, “On this vote, the yay’s are 50, the nay’s are 50. The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative and the bill as amended is passed.”
The White House under President Joe Biden highlighted that the Inflation Reduction Act “provided $80 billion in additional funding to the IRS.”
In a development early in 2023, the IRS proposed the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program, outlining it as “a voluntary tip reporting program between the IRS and employers in various service industries.”
The program aims to monitor employer compliance using actual annual tip revenue and charge tip data from employers’ point-of-sale systems, and it accommodates yearly adjustments in tipping practices.
Critics, however, voiced concerns about the supposedly voluntary nature of the program.
“There’s no reason they’d be issuing guidance on how to crack down on this if it was only going to end up being voluntary,” Mike Palicz from Americans for Tax Reform told Fox News.
“Ultimately, the goal is to go and grab as much revenue as possible and from whoever they can,” he added.
Palicz also highlighted a disconnect between IRS targets and previous assurances.
“They told us they’re not going to be coming after people earning $400,000 or less. Well, here’s a new IRS rule that’s focused on bringing in tips from waitresses,” he said.
“Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich… They’re coming after waitresses’ tips now,” Palicz added on social media.
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