by Bronson Winslow
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is partnering with a George Soros-funded nonprofit to study and establish a “direct file” tax return system, according to FedScoop.
The nonprofit, New America, alongside Loyola Law School Associate Professor of Law Ariel Jurow-Kleiman, will create a feasibility study authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which requires that the IRS work with independent third parties to establish free, online direct tax-filing, according to FedScoop. New America draws funding from a litany of left-learning philanthropic organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures LLC and the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations, according to New America’s funding disclosure.
“I think this is a prime example of how the left uses a nonprofit’s ‘nonpartisan’ tax status to deceive the public. We know New America is one of the leading groups for developing the left’s strategy, especially on ways to deceive and defeat conservatives. If they’re trying to get their claws into the IRS and its systems, that represents a huge intrusion by an ideological activist group into how our country runs the entire nonprofit sector,” Hayden Ludwig, director of policy research for conservative nonprofit Restoration of America, told the Daily Caller News Foundation
“Every nonprofit is legally required to be nonpartisan. But we know based on their funders and their past activist work, they are anything but ‘nonpartisan,’” Ludwig continued.
The IRS will work with New America and Jurow-Kleiman to examine the cost, the design and the ability to implement the new system, according to FedScoop. The study and establishment of the system will pull from the $4.8 billion set aside in the IRA to “modernize” business and cybersecurity systems.
“As required by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the IRS is working with independent third-party experts as it looks at the feasibility of an IRS-run ‘direct file’ tax return system. To assist the IRS with this work and assessment, the agency selected New America, a strictly non-partisan, non-profit think tank dedicated to public problem solving with expertise in technological change, the tax code, and the taxpayer experience of everyday Americans,” New America spokesperson Tara Moulson told the DCNF.
The funding draws from the $80 billion in funding set aside for the IRS within the IRA, and follows a 2023 report to Congress by the Office of the Taxpayer Advocate that directed the IRS to create a system to assist online filing for complex tax returns, according to FedScoop.
The existing method of online tax filing has several issues, as it does not allow taxpayers to upload documents and often does not allow tax returns to be processed if the user overrides certain entries, according to FedScoop.
“The IRS is on track to deliver a direct file report to Congress in May 2023,” Moulson continued.
The IRS and the Open Society Foundations did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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Bronson Winslow is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “George Soros” by Niccolò Caranti. CC BY-SA 3.0. Background Photo “Internal Revenue Service” by Joshua Doubek. CC BY-SA 3.0.
