Here’s the scene. You’re at home on a Saturday afternoon, a middle-class person minding your own business. You hear some commotion at the front door. Without warning, it’s kicked in. A group of men file into your entryway, many of them armed.

What’s going on? Why, it’s the Internal Revenue Service. Its agents have come to seize your hard-earned money.

It’s as silly as it sounds, but many would have us believe that such a crackdown is a legitimate, looming possibility. Look no further than Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, where, earlier this week, the National Republican Congressional Committee loosed a new campaign ad onto screens.

It opens in that grave, gravelly tone of voice: “Eighty-seven thousand new IRS agents,” displaying lines of suited men marching in lines. “Jared Golden and the Democrats in Congress voted to hire them. They doubled the size of the IRS to seize another $20 billion in new taxes from the middle class.”

We’re somewhat surprised by the timing of the ad – whose creators appear to be unconcerned by the fact that the bases for its claims were widely debunked back in the middle of August.

Here’s what’s true: The Inflation Reduction Act, passed two months ago, pipes funding into the IRS – about $80 billion of it over 10 years. In July of 2021, a Treasury Department report estimated that funding in this order would allow the IRS to hire, in that period, 87,000 employees.

And this is where the NRCC would like it to get murky. The buzz during the summer relied heavily on the concept of an “army,” to which the new NRCC ad gives a sideways nod.

Talk of militarization of the federal agency that oversees the collection of income taxes led its commissioner to defend it in an August op-ed.

Fewer than 1% of new hires will be part of the criminal investigation arm of the IRS, Charles P. Rettig clarified, “which currently has a total of about 2,100 special agents and is currently hiring about 300 more.” According to Bloomberg, 70% of that division are the sworn special agents, the would-be bogeymen who can carry firearms. The IRS, Rettig took the opportunity to note, is “an easy target for mischaracterizations.”

The IRS – in recent years synonymous with the words “backlog” and “overhaul” – is also in dire need of staff. There aren’t enough people to answer the phones, available technology is woefully out of date and chronic processing delays have caused untold trouble for millions of American taxpayers at a time.

Hiring – and retention – are critical to its ability to function, and its ability to function is eventually critical to the government’s ability to spend. While Rettig didn’t lay it out as starkly as he might have in his piece, he said it this way in a letter to the Senate: “The IRS has fewer front-line, experienced examiners in the field than at any time since World War II, and fewer employees than at any time since the 1970s.”

An easy target for mischaracterizations, the IRS is also an easy target in general. The Republican tradition of villainizing and hacking away at the IRS is just that, a tradition.

The Treasury Department has directed the IRS to shift its enforcement focus away from households earning less than $400,000. That rules out fresh scrutiny of the middle class. And even if it didn’t, an honest taxpayer has nothing to hide from the taxman.

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