Vice President Kamala Harris — who on Saturday copied a campaign promise first announced by former President Donald Trump to eliminate taxes on tips — voted in 2022 to pass legislation that allowed the IRS to track down workers’ tips so that they could be taxed.
On August 7, 2022, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act that provided $80 billion in additional funding to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which then got to work cracking down on the service industry’s reporting of tips so that they could be taxed.
“Two years ago today, I proudly cast the tie-breaking vote to pass our Inflation Reduction Act,” Harris’s Facebook account reminded the public on Wednesday, sharing a video of the vice president voting to pass the legislation.
“On this vote, the yay’s are 50, the nay’s are 50. The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative and the bill as amended is passed,” Harris said in the August 7, 2022, video.
President Joe Biden’s White House also boasted that the Inflation Reduction Act “provided $80 billion in additional funding to the IRS.”
In February 2023, the IRS released a proposed revenue procedure known as the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program.
The agency described SITCA as “a voluntary tip reporting program between the IRS and employers in various service industries” that would include “monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue and charge tip data from an employer’s point-of-sale system, and allowance for adjustments in tipping practices from year to year.”
“There’s no reason they’d be issuing guidance on how to crack down on this if it was only going to end up being voluntary,” Americans for Tax Reform’s Mike Palicz told Fox News at the time. “Ultimately, the goal is to go and grab as much revenue as possible and from whoever they can.”
“They told us they’re not going to be coming after people earning $400,000 or less,” Palicz added. “Well, here’s a new IRS rule that’s focused on bringing in tips from waitresses.”
Palicz also took to X to express his dismay, writing, “Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich… They’re coming after waitresses’ tips now.”
“It’s obvious the IRS hired 87,000 new agents to only target the rich,” entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David reacted. “Bad policies have consequences.”
“The IRS, they just announced that they want to start tracking all of the tips that workers earn so that they can be taxed for it,” Fox News’s Sean Hannity said. “And remember, this is all part of Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act.”
As Reason magazine reported in 2023, the White House touted the legislation’s $80 billion in new funding for the IRS, claiming it would “make our tax code fairer by cracking down on millionaires, billionaires, and corporations that evade their obligations.”
“It now appears that some of those resources — will, quite predictably, be aimed at individuals earning considerably less,” the magazine noted, adding that as a result, “the Treasury Department and IRS announced plans to overhaul existing programs that track tips earned by service sector workers,” citing the IRS’s new SITCA program.
Ironically, Harris claimed during a campaign rally in Nevada on Saturday that she would work to “eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
Social media users reacted to Harris’s claims with the hashtag #CopyCatKamala, pointing out that in June, former President Trump announced during a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, that if elected president, his administration would “not charge taxes on tips.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
