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Chris Smith Opposes IRS Enforcement on Undeclared $$, But Supports IRS Enforcement on Undeclared Babies

Chris Smith co-sponsored HR 4, which would overturn the provision of health care reform that required all businesses to issue 1099 forms for goods and services in excess of $600. The whole point of the 1099 provision was designed to crack down on unreported business income. Given Smith’s support for overturning the provision, we have to assume that he opposes the use of IRS to track and police undeclared business income.

Yet Smith authored HR 3, which deputizes the IRS to police abortion funding.

In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans’ “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops—that is, during an audit, they’d have to detemine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion.

[snip]

“Were this to become law, people could end up in an audit, the subject of which could be abortion, rape, and incest,” says Christopher Bergin, the head of Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit tax policy group. “If you pass the law like this, the IRS would be required to enforce it.”

No wonder our government has such a big deficit. Republicans want to alter our entire tax code to police wombs, but not pocketbooks.