Do you ever wonder where the money saved from tax credits actually goes? Apparently, so does the IRS.
A new government watchdog report found that the Internal Revenue service has handed out billions of dollars to support green energy projects, and then failed to mention how the money was spent on building new power generation.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that IRS tax subsidies to green energy operators “accounted for an estimated $13.7 billion in forgone revenue to the federal government for renewable projects and $1.4 billion for traditional projects” between 2004 and 2013.
That’s a lot of money, but the IRS can’t (or won’t) tell government auditors how much green energy generating capacity their tax subsidies are supporting. The GAO says the IRS “is not required to collect project level data from all taxpayers” who claim an Investment Tax Credit (ITC) or Production Tax Credit (PTC).
The IRS is empowered with the responsibility to enforce who pays more and who pays less in taxes, but none of the accountability to make sure it’s done right. The IRS should not be able to socially engineer the U.S. through its tax code, and stories like this are proof they aren’t even capable of doing such a thing. We need to ditch our “make rules now, figure out the details later” tax code and pass serious reform.
