Joe Biden’s IRS Stormtroopers Coming For The Poor Tax-Dodging Millionaires
Is this even America if rich people pay taxes?
You might recall that after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act last year, Republicans claimed that Joe Biden was amassing an army of 87,000 IRS agents to crush average Americans, who are just sitting on their porches, minding their own business. That was nonsense, of course. The IRA provided much-needed funding for overall tax enforcement so the IRS could crack down on corporate and high-income tax evaders — not people who actually pay their taxes.
The IRS announced last week that it’s going after 1,600 millionaires who owe at least $250,000 each in overdue taxes. That’s a lot of bananas. Even in commie Oregon, it would take someone with a $50,000 annual salary more than 20 years to rack up that tax bill. And of course, this average person probably pays their taxes.
Rather than the Republican-imagined zombie army of 87,000 tax collectors, the IRS will have just “dozens” — that’s less, Rep. Boebert — of revenue officers focused on high-end collections cases for fiscal-year 2024. That starts in October and ends in September 2024.
The IRS also has its eye on 75 large business partnerships boasting average assets of at least $10 billion. The agency even plans to use artificial intelligence to track down tax cheats, and while that sounds like the start of a dystopian future, at least the AI isn’t writing TV scripts.
Some Republican politicians and right-leaning pundits have raised concerns outright lied that the IRS would use its new funding to go after middle-income Americans while laughing maniacally. However, the IRS has repeatedly stated that it doesn’t intend to increase its audit rates for anyone earning less than $400,000 a year, which is pretty much everyone. Just 1.8 percent of Americans make more than $400,000 a year. That wealthy TikTok influencer is not one of you.
There has been a systemic effort from Republicans to shrink the IRS workforce, and as a result, audit rates have dropped considerably in recent decades. According to CBS News, the agency “employed 82,000 workers in fiscal-year 2021, down from 94,000 workers in 2010, even as the US population and number of taxpayers has grown over the same period.”
Meanwhile, the number of people with incomes of more than $1 million has jumped 50 percent over the past decade, but the number of audits for people in that income bracket has fallen by two-thirds.
“The years of underfunding that predated the Inflation Reduction Act led to the lowest audit rate of wealthy filers in our history,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said Friday in a statement.
“If you pay your taxes on time it should be particularly frustrating when you see that wealthy filers are not,” Werfel added.
Yes, indeed, it is.
Back in 2021, a team of IRS researchers and economists discovered that the top one percent of US income earners fail to report more than 20 percent of their earnings. That’s probably not a collective “oopsie.” Considering the level of wealth in that single percentage point, we’re talking serious money — far more than I cost the state of New York when I once forgot to file a state income tax return in the mid-1990s (I’d just filed federal through the EZ-BROKE-ASS form). When I did file a year later, I included an apologetic note that I’m sure is framed somewhere. The state actually owed me money, so it was fine, and I didn’t get the Willie Nelson treatment.
[CBS News]
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"These are not the unreported capital gains you're looking for."
We should step up enforcement, but one thing that would make enforcement easier is to staff up the IRS to do everyone's taxes for them. For most taxpayers, the IRS already has your information and can calculate what you owe, and it's absurd to say "we can figure out what you owe, but why don't you figure it out first, and then if you are wrong we will fuck you up". Having the IRS do it for you--and of course you'd still have the right to calculate it yourself and dispute the IRS's result--would be very popular for the vast majority of taxpayers who don't mind paying what they owe but find the whole process not just a chore, but a source of major anxiety (do you ever know for certain you did it right, and aren't going to get nailed in a year or two?).
Impossible, you say? Some countries already do this and their citizens wonder why we put up with such a stupid system.
Next up in Brando rants--why the fuck can't we require vendors to post their prices with sales taxes already included?