It won’t surprise you to learn that those 87,000 new agents the IRS will hire over the next few years are not going to be twiddling their thumbs or playing games on their computers all day.

Many of them are going to be conducting audits. You might applaud the idea that the IRS was going to audit all those billionaires and multi-millionaires. And you’d be right to do so.

But what if the audits mostly targeted middle-class Americans?

The IRS will conduct 1.2 million additional annual audits, thanks to a doubling of its budget in the Inflation Reduction Act. And a GOP analysis based on recent audit rates and tax filing data shows that 60% of those audits will be targeting Americans with incomes of $75,000 or less.