This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Flush with $80 billion in new funding, the IRS is aiming to ramp up audits of wealthy taxpayers and large corporations, according to a strategic operating plan it released Thursday. The 150-page plan also includes a lengthy list of proposed changes intended to improve customer service, upgrade the agency’s notoriously outdated computer systems, boost hiring and even “explore making it easier” to file tax returns directly with the IRS for free.

Until a spurt of funding during the early pandemic and then the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS had been hobbled by a decade of budget cuts, causing audit and enforcement rates to plummet. As the report notes: “Taxpayers earning $1 million or more were subject to an audit rate of just 0.7% in 2019 — a sharp decline from 7.2% in 2011. We will increase enforcement for high-income and high-wealth individuals to help ensure they are paying the taxes they owe.” It cites employment taxes, excise taxes, and estate and gift taxes as areas of focus. The plan promises to comply with a Treasury Department directive not to increase audit rates for small businesses and people making $400,000 or less.

ProPublica has been chronicling the tax agency’s woes for almost five years, first in a series titled “Gutting the IRS,” which examined the slashing of its budget and its consequences in reduced enforcement, as well as in decreased volume and quality of audits of the rich. ProPublica also published articles that showed how a person making $20,000 was more likely to be audited than a person making $400,000 and a map that revealed the geographic overlay of poverty, race and high audit rates.

ProPublica followed its first IRS series with “The Secret IRS Files,” a second multiyear series that has explored how the U.S. tax system favors the rich, including how its focus on income allows people with massive wealth to sidestep taxes on an epic scale — to the point where some of the wealthiest people, such as Jeff Bezos, had years in which they paid no federal tax.

In comments to The Washington Post about the new IRS plan, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said: “One of the things that people talk about when they say that the tax code is unfair is, if you’re low-income, you’re more likely to be audited than if you’re wealthy. … That is not consistent with tax fairness.”

The plan, released by recently confirmed IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, aligns with the remarks made by President Joe Biden in his most recent State of the Union address: “I think a lot of you at home agree with me that our present tax system is simply unfair,” Biden said. He reiterated his proposal for what he calls his billionaire minimum tax, which would mandate a 20% minimum levy on income, including unrealized capital gains, for people with a net worth of $100 million or more.

The IRS plan also includes an initiative to “study the feasibility” of allowing taxpayers to file directly with the agency. That study will likely face opposition from companies such as Intuit, the maker of the widely used TurboTax software. In another series, “The TurboTax Trap,” ProPublica documented in exhaustive detail multiyear efforts taken by tax prep companies to undercut free tax-filing.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chair of the Senate Finance Committee, applauded the IRS plan. “The bulk of this funding,” he noted in a statement, “will go toward building up the IRS’s capacity to root out cheating by sophisticated, wealthy individuals and companies with highly complex structures.” (The Inflation Reduction Act legislation directed an additional $45.6 billion to IRS enforcement, through September 2031, on top of its previously allotted budget.)

Republicans were less enthusiastic, calling the plan “big government at its worst,” among other things. In January, House Republicans renewed their attempts to reduce the agency’s funding.

This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

In a rare public statement, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas responded Friday to a ProPublica report that revealed that Thomas has, for decades, accepted luxury travel from billionaire Republican megadonor Harlan Crow and failed to disclose it.

Thomas’ brief statement acknowledges joining Crow and his wife, who he described as among his “dearest friends,” on “a number of family trips” over the years. He also defended his failure to disclose them.

“Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” Thomas said in the statement. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure, and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”

But seven legal ethics experts consulted by ProPublica, including former ethics lawyers for Congress and the White House, said the law clearly requires that gifts of transportation, including private jet flights, be disclosed. If Thomas is arguing otherwise, the experts said, he is incorrect.

A Supreme Court spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions for Thomas about the specifics of the advice he was given or who he consulted.

ProPublica’s story Thursday revealed that Thomas had taken international cruises on Crow’s superyacht, flown on Crow’s private jet and regularly vacationed at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. In one instance, Thomas flew on Crow’s jet from Washington Dulles airport to New Haven, Connecticut, then flew back three hours later.

Thomas did not respond to detailed questions for that story. His statement Friday did not dispute ProPublica’s reporting about his trips. It also did not address broader criticisms from ethics experts and other judges that by repeatedly accepting such trips, he broke long-standing ethical norms for judges’ conduct.

In a previous statement to ProPublica, Crow said that Thomas “never asked for any of this hospitality” and that his treatment of the justice was “no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends.”

A law passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Ethics in Government Act, requires Supreme Court justices and many other federal officials to report most gifts to the public. Justices are generally required to report all gifts worth more than $415, defined as “anything of value” that they don’t repay the full cost of. Gifts are disclosed in an annual financial report that is made public.

There are exceptions, and experts parsing the legality of Thomas’ failure to disclose the travel have been focused on a carve-out known as the “personal hospitality” exemption.

The exemption states that gifts of “food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality” don’t have to be disclosed. The law defines “personal hospitality” in a way that further limits the exception. It only applies to gifts received from an individual at that person’s home or at properties that they or their family own.

ProPublica asked the seven legal ethics experts about the exception and Thomas’ statement. All said that the law’s language clearly requires that gifts of transportation, such as private jet travel or cruises on a yacht, be disclosed and said Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to report them.

“I don’t think you can make an argument that private jet flights need not be included under the statute,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus and ethics expert at New York University law school.

”It is absolutely impossible that anyone could reasonably interpret that exception to apply to private jet flights,” said Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. “Not in any universe.”

Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush White House, said Thomas’ explanation of why he didn’t disclose the trips “makes absolutely no sense.” Painter emphasized that the exemption only covers three categories: food, lodging and entertainment. Private jet flights would fall into none of those, he said.

“Justice Thomas likes to focus on the language of authoritative texts, and that’s not what he’s doing in this statement,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Thomas himself disclosed at least one private jet flight from Crow, in his financial disclosure for 1997. He has not disclosed a trip on Crow’s plane in more than 20 years.

Reviewing other federal judges’ financial disclosure filings, ProPublica found at least six examples of judges disclosing gifts of private jet travel in recent years.

In the Ethics in Government Act, Congress explicitly stated that the law covers Supreme Court justices. But Chief Justice John Roberts has raised questions about Congress’ power to impose rules on the Supreme Court.

“The Court has never addressed whether Congress may impose those requirements on the Supreme Court,” Roberts wrote roughly a decade ago in an annual report on the judiciary. “The Justices nevertheless comply with those provisions.”

Thomas’ statement Friday does not cite the law itself but rather “disclosure guidelines” for the judiciary. The guidelines elaborate on how the law applies to the courts and are issued by the policymaking arm of the judiciary.

Thomas’ statement refers to a March update of the judiciary’s guidelines for financial disclosure. “It is, of course, my intent to follow this guidance in the future,” he said. The new guidelines explicitly say that transportation is not food, lodging or entertainment and so must be disclosed.

Questions about Thomas’ compliance with the disclosure law have come up in the past. In 2011, he announced that he was amending years’ worth of his disclosure forms because he had failed to disclose the sources of his wife, Ginni’s, income.

At the time, he cited a “misunderstanding of the filing instructions.”