| No Images? Click here   President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress say they have a plan for tax reform. If it passes, the rich will get richer. But what about poor people? They could actually face a tax increase under the GOP plan, HuffPost's Arthur Delaney reported this week. We asked him about his story.
How did this story come about? I have covered the safety net for several years, so when tax reform started coming around the bend I looked into Republicans' plans for the earned income tax credit, which is an important part of the federal safety net that happens to be administered by the IRS. Ostensibly Republicans desired no changes, but I gradually learned about how their longstanding grievance about "fraud" in the EITC has actually become a low-key part of their overall tax plan. It's often hard to get readers to care about tax policy. How did you try to change that? I hoped explaining that this aspect of tax reform is potentially a direct tax hike on poor people would automatically resonate because it is contrary to everything they've said about their plan. It is also contrary to the supposedly populist politics that put Donald Trump in the White House. People may think tax policy is arcane and something that only directly affects people with accountants, but this really looks like taking money from poor people. What was the biggest challenge in reporting, writing or editing this piece? Things that might have been challenging about this piece were not so difficult because I had learned a little about the "tax gap," IRS enforcement patterns and the vagaries of "pass-through" business income from other recent tax stories. What's the most surprising thing you found out while reporting this story? Maybe it shouldn't have been, but it was surprising to me how aggressively the IRS audits people claiming the earned income tax credit given how much more revenue is lost due to businesses underreporting their income. It is a similar sort of "fraud" in both cases. What do you want readers to take away from the piece? Tax reform: it's not just for the rich and middle class.
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