Hagerty Files Amendment To Reverse IRS Snooping On Third-Party Payment Platforms

Amendment would strike the Biden Administration’s intrusive American Rescue Plan provision requiring tens of thousands of small businesses to provide their personal information to the IRS.

Image Credit: Senator Bill Hagerty / Facebook

Press Release –

United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, has filed an amendment to Democrats’ tax-increase legislation to strike the provision inserted by the Biden Administration in the American Rescue Plan (ARP) that requires third-party payment platforms to report businesses’ gross transaction volumes totaling more than $600 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

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“In a completely Orwellian fashion, under this new small-transaction reporting requirement, Big Government will have access to almost any small business or entrepreneur’s transaction records,” said Senator Hagerty. “The Biden Administration has been relentless in its attempt to invade the privacy of Americans’ lives and finances since the day it took office—and now it wants to double down. Democrats are rushing to give an agency with a scandal-plagued track record more than six times its annual budget to investigate American taxpayers and small businesses, despite that it can’t effectively investigate its own illegal leaks of taxpayer information. This is just another weapon in the Administration’s war on American businesses, and it is past time we put an end to its egregious and unwarranted overreach.”

Democrats’ tax-increase legislation includes an additional $80 billion in funding for the IRS, despite that the agency’s annual budget for Fiscal Year 2022 was only $12.6 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this would allow the IRS to collect an additional $204 billion in taxes. Based upon a nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation analysis, between 65 and 78 percent of this $204 billion would likely come from Americans earning less than $100,000.

Over the past year, Democrats have used the IRS to target conservative political organizations and wealthy Americans to further their political agenda, and earlier this year, the Washington Examiner reported that, under this new ARP small-transaction reporting requirement, third-party payment processors like Venmo and PayPal will be required to report business transaction volumes totaling more than $600 to the IRS.

In February, Hagerty introduced the Stop the Nosy Obsession with Online Payments, or SNOOP Act, to remove this invasive requirement from the American Rescue Plan. This amendment would include the SNOOP Act in Democrats’ tax-increase legislation currently being debated on the Senate floor to stop the new IRS funding from being used to increase enforcement of this new small-transaction reporting requirement against taxpayers and small businesses.