The IRS, Obamacare, and You: The Spending

Getting the Obamacare “train wreck” up and running will cost the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) an estimated $881 million between 2010 and 2013, according to the Government Accountability Office. As of last June, the IRS had already requested more than half a billion dollars from an implementation “slush fund” established in Obamacare.

In a report to Congress this spring, the IRS disclosed the amounts of spending and numbers of employees devoted to Obamacare implementation from 2010 through 2012. Among other areas, the IRS devoted:

• $2.1 million and 13 full-time employees to implement the tax increases on drug manufacturers and health insurers,
• $12 million and 150 full-time employees to “customer service support,”
• $405.2 million and 700 full-time employees to creating the infrastructure to support the exchanges and the individual mandate tax, and
• $20.8 million and 161 full-time employees to “promot[e] compliance with other new provisions.”

This gusher of new spending will continue even after Obamacare is up and running. In its budget submission this year, the IRS requested even more spending—a whopping $439.6 million—and 1,954 new employees.
This ongoing spending—over $1 billion in just the law’s first four years—only adds to the trillions in new entitlement programs created by the law. It’s one more reason Obamacare is unaffordable—for the taxpayers forced to fund it, and forced to live under new IRS mandates, edicts, and regulations.
As we’ve previously noted, Obamacare includes no fewer than 18 separate tax increases, raising at least $1 trillion in the law’s first 10 years alone. Worse yet, the IRS will need to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ hard-earned money to take these trillions in new revenues from taxpayers.

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