Conservative special interest groups and politicians are ramping up efforts targeting President Joe Biden’s plans to hire more agents for the Internal Revenue Service to conduct audits on wealthy individuals and corporations, Politico reports.

Biden’s efforts to bolster the auditors at the IRS comes after nearly a decade when more than 28% of the agency’s auditors–roughly 3,100 staffers–left and were not replaced between 2010 and 2019, the Associated Press reported last September.  The personnel shortage impacted the ability of the IRS to audit complex returns typically submitted by wealthy individuals, whose returns cannot be easily checked automatically.

The Trump Administration worked to limit IRS operations by reducing the agency’s budget, a fact that was brought into the spotlight when it was discovered the alleged billionaire Donald Trump reportedly paid $750 in income taxes in 2016 and 2017. During the Trump Administration, those with annual incomes under $25,000 are audited at a higher rate (0.69%) than those with incomes up to $500,000 (0.53%).

According to a 2020 study by University of Pennsylvania law professor Natasha Sarin and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, the IRS will fail to collect nearly $7.5 trillion in taxes owed between 2020 and 2029, largely because of the lack of audit and enforcement ability.

Now, as Biden’s aggressive infrastructure programs and policies favoring working class Americans are promoted, Biden is looking to bolster IRS enforcement, particularly among the top tier of income files.  Biden intends to hire 87,000 IRS staffers over the next ten years.

The Biden plan spends $80 billion on new tax enforcement efforts, which it predicts would bring in about $700 billion, a roughly 9-to-1 return on investment.

Coalition to Protect American Workers, an organization run by Mike Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short, has already taken out ads decrying the increase of IRS auditors, but dishonestly insinuating the new staff would be targeting working class Americans.  “If Joe Biden gets his way, they are coming: IRS agents,” the narrator in the ad says. “Biden’s massive tax increase plan includes a staggering $80 billion to help recruit an army of IRS agents.”

Short’s organization is likely to face a legal fight over the ad, but not about content.  The ad claims it’s sponsored by “Building America’s Future,” the same name of an organization formed 13 years ago by former Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, former Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, then an independent.