A former FBI agent discussed resurfaced Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recruitment videos Friday, saying the agency was having trouble hiring and keeping people.
“I’m not a big fan of how the recruitment is being done these days with the job fairs and things like that. But as I just said, they’re struggling to recruit people,” James Gagliano, a former FBI agent, told “Fox News Tonight” host Brian Kilmeade. “How President Biden and his administration thinks they’re going to hire an additional 87,000 employees, all of them will not be armed, but I don’t know how they’ll do it. I don’t think the ads will help.” (RELATED: Biden Cabinet Member Claims Colorblind IRS Algorithms Are ‘Racially Biased’)
The Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law in August, included $80 billion for the IRS to hire up to 87,000 news agents, among other budgetary expenditures. Some experts claimed that the expended IRS would primarily target small businesses.
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“For years and years, the IRS has had an arm called the Criminal Investigative Division. Those folks are armed,” Gagliano said. “They are agents… it started with the Treasury Department, you’re thinking about Elliott Ness, back in those days. And there are occasions where people can be violent.”
“They’ve only got about 4,000 total members now that carry firearms,” Gagliano added. “They’re dealing with everything that police are right now with the defund movement. They’re having trouble recruiting, trouble in retention.”
Kilmeade noted the visit that IRS agents paid to the home of journalist Matt Taibbi, who was among the journalists who reported on censorship and shadow-banning carried out by Twitter based on documents released by Elon Musk after the Tesla CEO bought the company in order to provide transparency on issues like the censorship of an October 2020 report by the New York Post.
“I just find it hard to believe that they’re going to crack down on the rich,” Kilmeade said. “I find it hard to believe they’re not going to crack on the deli owner, the dry-cleaner, the gas station owner, because they get a lot of revenue in, revenue out.”
The IRS also faced criticism centered around the reported targeting of conservative groups and leaks of taxpayer data to ProPublica, a left-wing media outlet, in 2013 and 2021. Lois Lerner, a central figure in the allegations of targeting conservative groups, escaped criminal charges.
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