A conservative legal group is arguing the Biden administration’s “racial equity” agenda will lead to white and Asian Americans being targeted for tax audits and is seeking information to prove the case.
The America First Legal Foundation is responding to a Feb. 16 order signed by President Joe Biden that demands every single federal agency have an “equity action plan” to address what are euphemistically called “underserved communities,” as Fox News reported.
The group filed a Freedom of Information Act request on Tuesday alleging that, “When read in context with the Department of the Treasury’s ongoing efforts to racialize tax policy, the new Executive Order signals that the Biden Administration intends to alter Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) audit algorithms to target white, Asian, or mixed-race taxpayers. “
On its website, the group explained the issue.
BREAKING: America First Legal launches investigation into the IRS for race-based tax auditing following the release of Biden’s new marxist EO mandating all government power be exercised on the basis of race or gender in the name of “equity”: https://t.co/lurIP9fnsV
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) February 22, 2023
“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,” it states.
The group alleged 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.”
It added that with Biden’s latest equity edict, “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.’”
The FOIA request notes that in May 2021, “Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo ‘reiterated the Treasury Department’s commitment to racial equity [sic] as a key factor in the design of tax compliance[.]’”
The request notes that in December 2021, Adeyemo and Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Lily Batchelder said “they were ‘examining the tax system through a racial equity [sic] lens.’”
The FOIA request notes that during the Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity first meeting, “advisory committee members exclaimed that ‘tax policy disadvantages Black Americans while Advantaging White Americans,’ and ‘It is not enough to say “tax people making over $400,000” if those people who get audited are Black and Brown.’”
“Given the Biden Administration’s deep-seated racial fixations, there is a clear and present danger that Biden’s Treasury Department and IRS plan to use at least some of their new army of IRS agents to conduct race-based audits and enforcement actions against white, Asian, and mixed- race taxpayers,” the FOIA request said.
Biden’s equity agenda was excoriated by America First Legal President Stephen Miller in a statement on the group’s website.
“With the stroke of a pen, Biden has transformed the entire federal government into a DEI cult—putting equity czars inside virtually every single agency of the executive branch and subordinating every department to the Marxist equity agenda,” Miller said.
“The most extreme excesses of the radical woke college campus have just been transported into, and embedded within, every function of the federal government — in an attempt to supplant the actual laws and Constitution of the United States in order to punish and exclude Americans based on their race, ancestry, and gender,” he wrote.
“Biden does this all by passing no new laws, let alone constitutional amendments, but by ordering the permanent bureaucracy to follow his written orders to completely remake government in the image of the ultra-woke ultra-radical left,” he wrote.
“Workers will be retrained and re-educated. Policies will be redrawn and redesigned. Benefits will be redirected and reoriented, all according to the Marxist equity czars and their taskmasters in the White House,” Miller wrote.
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