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A waiter delivers food to patrons at a restaurant, Jan. 21, 2022, in Miami Beach, Fla. (AP)
Tips were federally taxed before Vice President Kamala Harris voted in favor of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.
The IRS’ tip reporting program is unrelated to the Inflation Reduction Act. It was introduced in 2023 as a way for employers in the service industry to voluntarily report tips. Similar tip compliance programs have existed since 1993.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have both said they would stop taxing tips in their bid for the presidency.
But some people online have called Harris hypocritical, accusing her of voting in 2022 to tax service workers’ tips.
An Instagram post shows a video of Harris voting for the Inflation Reduction Act. Text overlaying the video reads, "Kamala Harris Hopes Service Workers Forget She was the Tie-Breaking Vote for the IRS to GO AFTER TIPS!"
The video then claims that the Inflation Reduction Act hired 87,000 IRS agents to launch a tip reporting site. "KAMALA TAXED YOUR TIPS," another text layer says.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
People have had to pay federal taxes on tips for decades, long before the Inflation Reduction Act was passed. In 2021, the IRS said it planned to hire more than 86,000 new employees over 10 years. But those employees would not all be working in enforcement. And the IRS tip reporting program is a voluntary program that would replace existing tax compliance programs.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act increased taxes on large corporations, including companies making more than $1 billion in three years. It also gave an additional $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
The claim that the IRS would hire 87,000 IRS agents came from a 2021 Department of Treasury report that said the IRS would use the $80 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act to hire 86,852 full-time employees.
PolitiFact previously found that the new hires would not work solely as auditors or in enforcement. Some of the additional funding would also go toward operations support, taxpayer services and modernizing the agency’s business system, a congressional research report showed.
The IRS did propose a tip reporting program in 2023 that would let service industry employers report tips voluntarily to help with tax compliance.
The program is not entirely new. It would replace three other tip compliance agreements that have existed since 1993.
Kamala Harris did not vote for a law that taxed service workers’ tips. Tips have been federally taxed for decades.
In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act allocated $80 billion to hire 87,000 full-time IRS employees. Those employees would be hired in a 10-year period, meaning the 87,000 new employees could not all be hired to launch the agency’s tip reporting program.
The IRS did start a program in 2023 in which employers could voluntarily report tips to the IRS. That program is not a new concept and was intended to replace three similar tip compliance programs.
We rate the claim that Kamala Harris voted in favor of passing a law in 2022 to tax tips False.
PolitiFact Staff Writer Loreben Tuquero contributed to this report.
Instagram post (archived), Aug. 13, 2024
Congress.gov, H.R.5376 - Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, accessed Aug. 15, 2024
The Department of the Treasury, The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda, May 2021
PolitiFact, Check, please. Are IRS agents coming for servers’ tips?, Feb. 10, 2023
PolitiFact, Kevin McCarthy’s mostly false claim about an army of 87,000 IRS agents, Aug. 11, 2022
Congressional Research Service, IRS-Related Funding in the Inflation Reduction Act, Oct. 20, 2022
IRS, IRS introduces new service industry tip reporting program, Feb. 6, 2023
IRS, Employer-designed Tip Reporting Program for the Food and Beverage Industry, accessed Aug. 15, 2024
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