wouldn't eliminating the irs enable the government to more easily collect taxes such as in a Fair Tax system

Answer 1

You mean eliminate the Internal Revenue Code. You can't eliminate the IRS. The IRS is the government agency that administers the country's tax law and handles the collection of said taxes. If you were to eliminate the IRS as well as scrap the current tax system and implement a "fair tax" system, you would have to create a new government agency to handle the collection of the "fair tax".

FWIW, a "fair tax" system won't work. Any tax system you come up with will always disenfranchise someone.

Answer 2

The IRS would continue to thrive under the so-called "Fair Tax" system. Some agency would have to collect the taxes and verify that all sales were property taxed. That would fall to the IRS.

There would be a significant underground market for untaxed goods and knowing how the IRS works today, we'd probably have to open our homes to the revenue agents who would be looking for goods that didn't have the proper tax stamps affixed.

Then of course would be the income reporting requirements required of employers, financial institutions, etc. to ensure that taxpayers claiming the low-income tax-leveling payments were entitled to those payments. This would spawn a further subclass of off-the-books employment similar to what we have today.

All this sounds better than what we deal with now? Not to me!

Whenever you evaluate something like this you always must look into the "Rule of Unintended Consequences" to ensure that you aren't just replacing one problem with an entirely different one.