Por Renan Filho · 2026-09-23The Internal Revenue Service has a long history of wielding its immense power against those who can least afford to fight back — and according to economist Steve Moore, honest landowners are the latest victims. In a sharp critique published this week, Moore argued that the IRS has turned legitimate property transactions into bureaucratic nightmares, punishing middle-class families and small investors who made innocent mistakes or relied on outdated guidance.
Moore, a former senior economic advisor to the presidential transition and co-author of several books on fiscal policy, did not mince words. In a post on his personal blog and in subsequent interviews with conservative media, he said: “The IRS has become a weapon of mass destruction against the American dream of property ownership. They go after honest people who made a small error on a form, while the real tax cheats — the ones with armies of lawyers — walk away scot‑free.”
His comments come in the wake of multiple high‑profile cases where landowners in states like Texas, California, and Florida faced federal tax liens and penalties for what Moore described as “technical noncompliance” — such as failing to file a Form 1099‑S on a sale below the threshold, or misreporting a like‑kind exchange under Section 1031. In some instances, the IRS assessed penalties that exceeded the value of the property itself, leading to forced sales and financial ruin for families who had owned the land for generations.
The economist’s critique is rooted in a broader free‑market perspective. “The government should not be in the business of extracting wealth from productive citizens who are trying to build something,” Moore stated during an appearance on a popular radio program. “We need a tax code that is simple, fair, and predictable — not a labyrinth of traps that only an army of CPAs can navigate.”
Moore’s argument is supported by recent data from the IRS’s own Taxpayer Advocate Service, which reported that in fiscal year 2025, the agency issued over 3.2 million levies and liens, many of them against individuals with incomes under $100,000. The same report noted that nearly 40% of taxpayers who contacted the IRS for help with property‑related tax matters received incorrect or incomplete information. Moore points to this as evidence of systemic dysfunction: “When the agency itself cannot give consistent guidance, how can you hold a farmer in Kansas accountable for a mistake on a form that is 47 pages long?”
Why does this matter now? Because the IRS is in the middle of a massive expansion, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated an additional $80 billion over ten years to the agency. Critics on the right — and even some on the left — have warned that this infusion of cash would primarily be used to audit middle‑class families and small businesses, not wealthy corporations or sophisticated tax shelters. Moore’s intervention gives concrete, human faces to that warning. “The landowners I’m talking about are not hedge fund managers,” he wrote. “They are retired couples who bought a plot of land twenty years ago, held it, sold it, and now find themselves in a Kafkaesque dispute with a federal agency that has unlimited resources and zero accountability.”
From a free‑market perspective, the problem is twofold. First, the tax code itself is excessively complex, creating opportunities for bureaucratic abuse and making compliance costly. Second, the IRS, as a monopoly enforcement agency, faces no competitive pressure to improve service or accuracy. A farmer who receives a wrong answer from the IRS has no alternative to appeal to — except the courts, which are themselves expensive and slow. Moore advocates for a radical simplification of the tax code, including the elimination of many deductions and credits, in favor of a flatter, more transparent system. He also supports the creation of a taxpayer bill of rights that would limit the IRS’s ability to seize assets without a fair hearing.
The counterpoint, which must be acknowledged, is that the IRS has a legitimate mission to enforce tax laws and collect revenue. Proponents of the agency argue that cases of alleged abuse are anecdotal and that the overwhelming majority of audits are justified. They point to the agency’s own statistics, which show that audits of low‑income taxpayers have actually declined in recent years, while audits of large corporations have increased. However, those same statistics reveal that the “audit rate” for taxpayers earning less than $25,000 is still higher than for those earning between $200,000 and $1 million — a disparity that Moore and other critics find indefensible.
Moore’s solution is not to defund the IRS, but to reform it. He calls for a “sunset provision” on all tax code sections every five years, forcing Congress to justify every deduction and credit. He also proposes a “simplification commission” modeled on the successful military base closure process, where an independent panel would recommend consolidations and eliminations that Congress would then vote up or down without amendment. “We need to break the logjam,” he insists. “The tax code is a monument to special interests, and landowners are just the latest collateral damage.”
For the FORTIS reader, the lesson is clear. The story of the honest landowner caught in the IRS meat grinder is not just a tale of bureaucratic overreach — it is a parable about the cost of big government and the erosion of property rights. When the state has the power to seize assets based on a paperwork error, no one’s property is truly safe. Moore’s call for reform is timely, and it echoes a sentiment that crosses party lines: taxation without simplification is theft.