IRS orders massive security review amid surge in threats
The Internal Revenue Service is undertaking its biggest security review in more than 25 years, blaming an alarming rise in threats and “misinformation” over its approved massive hiring spree.
“We are conducting a comprehensive review of existing safety and security measures,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in a memo to his 78,600 employees on Tuesday.
“This includes conducting risk assessments based on data-driven decisions given the current environment and monitoring perimeter security, designations of restricted areas, exterior lighting, security around entrances to our facilities and other various protections.”
The major security review is the first of its kind since 1995, when 168 people were killed in Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Rettig told the Washington Post.
It follows the furious backlash to President Biden’s new tax, climate and drugs package that gives $80 billion to the IRS to beef up enforcement.
Rettig’s letter blamed the backlash on “an abundance of misinformation and false social media postings, some of them with threats directed at the IRS and its employees.”
Those raising alarm over the agency’s plans include high-ranking Republicans, such as House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who said the new hires were to help the government “snoop around” in bank accounts and “shake you down for every last cent.”
Florida Sen. Rick Scott also sent an August 16 open letter to Americans calling on them not to take any new IRS positions.
“The IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them,” he said in the letter.
Ronny Jackson, President Donald Trump’s White House physician who is now the Republican candidate for a Texas congressional seat, tweeted last week that “the IRS is recruiting an army of 87,000 SPECIAL AGENTS trained to use ‘DEADLY FORCE’.
“And trust me, they won’t be going after the billionaires. They will shakedown middle-class Americans for EVERY cent they have!”
Luis Miguel, a Republican Florida state House candidate, was banned from Twitter after saying he wanted to allow Floridians to “be able to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF, and all other federal troops on sight.”
The IRS commissioner told the Washington Post that the security review is needed because his “workforce is concerned about their safety.”
“We see what’s out there in terms of social media,” Rettig said. “The comments being made are extremely disrespectful to the agency, to the employees and to the country.”
Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said members who are of retirement age have expressed a greater desire to retire due to the threats. More than half of the IRS’ enforcement workforce of 80,000 is retirement eligible.
Several workers have said the hostility reminded them of the 2010 suicide attack in Austin, Texas, by Andrew Joseph Stack III, who crashed a single-engine plane into the Echelon office building, killing himself and IRS manager Vernon Hunter.
“The rhetoric we’re hearing now is dangerous,” Reardon said. “It’s putting these patriotic Americans at risk.”
With Post wires
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