![]() That bill may have secondary effects on average Americans that are hard to measure, experts told PolitiFact. Biden supports a House bill to ban certain assault weapons, but that measure is not likely to pass in the Senate and, even if it did, does not amount to a plan to wholesale disarm American citizens.īiden’s plan to raise taxes targets corporations and high-earning money managers, assuming the Inflation Reduction Act passes the U.S. The GAO report lists several others, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration.Īs to Gaetz’s claim that these efforts come because Biden is "raising taxes and disarming Americans," there is no evidence that the IRS’ longstanding spending on weapons and ammunition is connected to Biden’s positions on taxes and gun restrictions. Forest Service, and the Department of Education, which purchases them for its Office of the Inspector General. Gaetz mentioned the Department of Agriculture, which buys weapons and ammunition for the U.S. The IRS is not the only government agency that some people may be surprised to find purchasing guns and ammunition for law enforcement officers. The Government Accountability Office said that it does not have more recent data available. The report’s authors noted that officials at law enforcement agencies said they keep ammunition on hand to last for several months for use in training and operation, and that they order large quantities because sometimes there’s a long wait, up to a year, before the orders can be fulfilled. ![]() The report notes the numbers don’t include weapons or ammunition purchased for a small, separate IRS police force of fewer than a dozen officers that provides security at the Enterprise Computing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The report also said the IRS had 4,461 firearms and about 5 million rounds of ammunition in stock as of November 2017. The report described its numbers as minimum values because agencies reported challenges compiling requested data. From 2010 to 2017, it averaged $712,500 in ammunition spending. Government Accountability Office on firearms and ammunition purchases by federal law enforcement agencies, the IRS spent about $1.1 million on ammunition in 2011 and about $1 million in 2012. ![]() That’s slightly more than the money spent in 2021 ($655,013) and 2020 ($616,619).Īccording to a 2018 report (page 75 of the PDF) to Congress by the U.S. The IRS Criminal Investigation division ordered $725,460 worth of ammunition in fiscal year 2022, according to figures provided to PolitiFact by Justin Cole, the division’s communications director. That includes firearms training and handgun qualifications for agents, which is a big reason for the large orders for ammunition. Special agents train for weeks at the National Criminal Investigation Training Academy in Georgia, the 2021 report said. In the division’s 2017 report, then-division chief Don Fort wrote, "We have the same number of special agents - around 2,200 - as we did 50 years ago." The numbers haven’t changed much in decades. Those numbers haven’t changed much in five years, according to annual reports available on its website the 2022 report has not been published. The division had 2,046 special agents in 2021, a little less than the 2,159 agents it had in 2017. Recently they’ve been part of a multiagency task force tracking down assets of Russian oligarchs. Special agents in the division investigate a number of crimes, including money laundering, cybercrime, financial fraud and narcotics-related crimes. It was renamed the IRS Criminal Investigation in 1978. ![]() The unit famously investigated gangster Al Capone, who was convicted on tax evasion charges. The division in which agents are armed was established in 1919, when it was called the Intelligence Unit, according to the division’s 2019 report. The vast majority of those audits are done by mail. The people who work there are not the typical auditors that Americans facing routine audits will encounter. The IRS buys guns and ammunition yearly for IRS Criminal Investigation, the division that has jurisdiction over federal tax crimes. These purchases are not new or unique to the Biden administration - they have been made for an IRS division that has been armed for more than a century. But that is not unusual, and is actually a bit less than what was spent in other recent years. Here’s what we know: The IRS did spend about $725,000 on ammunition this year.
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