WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, today joined The Big Money Show on Fox Business to discuss his SNOOP Act to stop the Biden Administration’s attempted egregious and unwarranted overreach into Americans’ private information by requiring third-party payment platforms to report businesses’ gross transaction volumes totaling more than $600 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on his legislation, the SNOOP Act: “My bill is fixing a massive problem that we’ve seen with the Biden Administration and the IRS. They seem to have this overarching desire to get more of our personal information and hand it to the IRS, who have proven themselves to be untrustworthy [and] unreliable in terms of protecting Americans’ private information. In the past Congress, I asked [Treasury] Secretary [Janet] Yellen three times, on the record, where’s the accountability when the IRS actually leaked out private personal tax returns of, basically, their political opponents? Every time [there was] no answer [and] no accountability. I think the American public is rightly very concerned. Here’s what they’re trying to do: they’re trying to take a situation where, before, 200 commercial transactions and $20,000 worth of volume would be reported to the IRS, they’re trying to lower that threshold to just $600 worth of transactions. I think, probably, the local lemonade stand falls under that. But if you think about it, a mom basically foots the bill for ten girls on a lacrosse team who are going on a trip to take care of the hotel room, and the other mothers Venmo her back the reimbursement—she’s caught. You think about the couple that [is] moving from one house to the other, the couch doesn’t fit, and they sell the couch for $650—they’re caught. They’re going to be filing all this IRS paperwork, [which is] more cost to the consumer, more cost to taxpayers, and frankly, more vulnerability when you get down to the privacy of it.”
Hagerty on the Biden Administration’s attempted IRS overreach: “The Biden Administration has consistently said they’re targeting people who make $400,000 or above. This demonstrates that that is not true. They’re looking for people with over $600 worth of Venmo and PayPal transactions. You know, people are probably selling things that they’re losing money on, but they’re going to have to prove that to the IRS now. I think you can see from this that the IRS is coming after Middle America. That’s what this is all about. And the 83,000 [IRS] agents, you’ve got to be kidding me. The IRS can’t even demonstrate that they’ve held accountable the agents that they have so far in terms of the leak of personal information. This is so reckless, and I think it’s something the American public really wants to resist. That’s why I filed this legislation, and I’m going to continue to push through this Congress to make sure that we stop this.”
Hagerty on debt ceiling negotiations: “Here’s what’s happening: the Democrats are trying to frighten the public because what they want is another blank check when it comes to the debt ceiling negotiations. That is what this is all about. You’ve heard Republicans say time and time again, ‘We’ve got a spending problem,’ in Washington. We need to look at ways to address that. We don’t have to put the full faith and credit of the United States at risk. We don’t have to put social security at risk to do that. There’s a lot of spending that’s going on here in Washington that’s wasteful. There’s much that’s outdated. I think there are plenty of opportunities for us to work together with Democrats to try to fix that. But rather than do that, they’re just going to resort to scare tactics and argue that they need quote, ‘a clean extension’ of the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling was put in place as a check and balance on spending here in Washington. And you’ve heard my colleagues in the House of Representatives say they want to see something done about that—I’m with them on that. But we have never said that we’re going after Social Security [or] Medicare. What we’ve said is that we want to take a hard look at this and find responsible means of bringing our spending back into alignment with our revenues. That’s the focus here, and what you’re seeing coming from Senator [Bernie] Sanders is the typical talking point scare tactic [because] they’re focused on having, basically, an unlimited spending spree by lifting the debt ceiling, yet again, without having any consequence.”
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