IRS accused of targeting white, Asian, mixed-race taxpayers with audits under Biden's 'equity action plan'

America First Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group, claimed that Biden's recent executive order reveals that the administration "intends to alter Internal Revenue Service's audit algorithms to target white, Asian, or mixed-race taxpayers," Fox News Digital reported.

According to the AFL, the IRS plans to restructure its auditing practices to target taxpayers by race under the guise of "racial equity."

In 2021, Biden signed an executive order titled "Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government," which requested that the federal government prioritize creating a "whole-of-government approach to equity."

Last week, Biden passed another executive order, "Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government," which mandated that all federal agencies create an annual "equity action plan" to remove barriers and increase engagement in "underserved communities."

The order directs federal agencies to "prevent and remedy discrimination, including by protecting the public from algorithmic discrimination."

According to the AFL, "There is very strong reason to believe that the Treasury Department is altering the IRS's audit algorithms to illegally operationalize racial quotas and/or requiring agents to use imputed race and ethnicity data to ensure 'racial equity.'"

In response, the legal group filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for communication records from January 2021 onward from specific individuals at the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other senior officials.

The request seeks communication "referring to 'discrimination,' 'discriminatory,' 'race,' 'racial,' ‘ethnicity,' 'color,' 'BIPOC,' 'Asian' 'Indigenous,' 'Black,' 'Brown,' or 'White' on the one hand, and 'audit,' 'enforcement,' 'NRP,' 'RAAS,' 'algorithmic,' 'selection,' 'sampling,' or 'strata,' on the other."

Currently, the IRS' National Research Program randomly selects tax returns for audit, but the AFL argued that Biden's recent executive order could impact how tax returns are selected going forward.

The administration's "deep-seated racial fixations" pose "a clear and present danger" to white, Asian, and mixed-race taxpayers, the AFL claimed.

"The notion that race should play any role whatsoever in the IRS's operations is absurd, offensive to the American ideal, and illegal," said Gene Hamilton, AFL vice president and general counsel.

"But the Biden administration is so blinded by its relentless obsession with race that it is willing to make IRS enforcement decisions based on the race of American citizens. We will fight their attempts to erode equality under the law and expose their attempts to inject toxic 'equity’-based policies throughout the federal government," Hamilton added.

The Treasury Department did not reply to a request for comment, Fox News Digital reported.

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