September 12, 2022

Trump-funded super PAC takes to the airwaves with totally false claims about provisions in popular legislation that will help stop rich people from cheating on taxes

(Seattle, WA) — MAGA Republican Tiffany Smiley’s Senate campaign is getting a $500,000 boost this week from a major Trump-funded super PAC. Our American Century — which OpenSecrets describes as “a single-candidate super PAC in support of Donald Trump” — dropped half a million dollars on an ad with false claims about the IRS provisions of the popular Inflation Reduction Act. 

“Tiffany Smiley is trying as hard as she can to hide it, but Washington voters can follow the money to see she’s the handpicked candidate of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell,” said Washington state Democratic Party spokesperson Caitlin Harrington. “Donald Trump and his allies are pouring money into this race because they know that while Patty Murray will stand up to anyone who doesn’t put Washington first, Tiffany Smiley would be a rubber stamp for the extreme Republican agenda — from banning abortion and denying free, fair election results, to handing more wasteful tax breaks to the very wealthiest.”

Smiley attended the MAGA Leadership Convention in 2018, campaigned for Donald Trump in 2020, and earlier this year said it would be “awesome” to have Trump’s endorsement. Over the weekend, Smiley headlined a fundraising event in Yakima with Dinesh D’Souza – a notorious conspiracy theorist and leading proponent of Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election. And this Thursday, Smiley will headline a MAGA fundraiser in Miami with other extreme Senate GOP candidates like Blake Masters, Joe O’Dea, Adam Laxalt, Ted Budd, and J.D. Vance.

BACKGROUND ON IRS PROVISIONS IN INFLATION REDUCTION ACT:

• Estimates suggest that the top 1% of Americans do not pay $160 billion in owed taxes each year. Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers cut the IRS budget by roughly 20 percent — and as a result just 2 percent of the richest Americans had their taxes audited in 2019, down from 16 percent in 2010. The richest 1 percent of Americans are estimated to be hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the IRS.
• The Inflation Reduction Act invests $80 billion over ten years in the IRS to help the agency have the resources it needs to take on the wealthiest Americans who are cheating on their taxes, and update decades-old technology that will help the IRS better service taxpayers. 
• The Washington Post recently reported on how technology at the IRS is decades out of date — new funding is badly-needed to help the IRS better serve taxpayers, cut down on backlogs and wait times, and help bring IRS technology into the 21st century.
• Trump-appointed IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has committed to Congress that the resources for the IRS included in the Inflation Reduction Act would not increase audit rates for households making less than $400,000 annually, and Treasury Secretary Yellen also directed the IRS not to use any of the new funding allocated in this bill to increase the likelihood that Americans making less than $400,000 each year will get audited.

A bipartisan group of former IRS commissioners verified that “for ordinary Americans who already fulfill their tax obligations, audit scrutiny will decline, because the IRS will be better at selecting returns for examination… This bill is about getting to the heart of the problem and pursuing high-end taxpayers and corporations who today illegally evade their tax obligations.”

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