No, Kamala Harris didn’t vote in 2022 for a law that would tax service workers’ tips

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.

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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). 

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stated on October 27, 2024 in Social media posts

Photo shows people lined up outside Madison Square Garden before an Oct. 27 rally by former President Donald Trump.

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.