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Treasury recovers $1.3 billion in unpaid taxes from high-wealth tax dodgers (apnews.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/news@lemmy.world
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The IRS has collected $1.3 billion from high-wealth tax dodgers since last fall, the agency announced Friday, crediting spending that has ramped up collection enforcement through President Joe Biden’s signature climate, health care and tax package signed into law in 2022.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel traveled to Austin, Texas, to tour an IRS campus and announce the latest milestone in tax collections as Republicans warn of big future budget cuts for the tax agency if they take over the White House and Congress.

Yellen said in a speech in Austin that in 2019, the top one percent of wealthy Americans owed more than one-fifth of all unpaid taxes, “leaving ordinary Americans to shoulder the burden.”

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[–] 44 points 2 years ago (4 children)

The IRS might need a bigger budget to make them morally pay. Prosecution is expensive.

I'm entirely in support, of course, so I say we should increase the IRS's budget and do it. But I also get why the IRS doesn't want to walk up to Congress right now, hat in hand, and say "We spent more money prosecuting them than we gained" or anything close to that, and give the GOP ammo for defunding them again.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago

    For-profit framing of public services is indeed a problem, as we can see with prisons too. Probably, it's better to call their avoided taxes stolen money, money stolen from regular citizen, and the return on them as a punishment for theft. And then point out how many investments in public infrastructure and services could've been done for these money: in miles of roads not layed, in new schools not built, - and that's the same weight goes onto shoulders of regular Joes who millionaires stole them from. And insist that this kind of theft should be punished, for if regular americans are obligated to suffer the tax filling and paying process, it's unfair these chuds with hired accountants and lawyers don't.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    But I also get why the IRS doesn't want to walk up to Congress right now, hat in hand, and say "We spent more money prosecuting them than we gained" or anything close to that, and give the GOP ammo for defunding them again.

    https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60037

    Actual outlays for enforcement. Outlays for enforcement activities in 2023 were less than projected. Most of the expenditures from the enforcement account stem from labor costs, and through 2023, the IRS hired fewer revenue agents (the enforcement staff who handle complex audits) than it had planned. That shortfall suggests that the IRS has encountered greater difficulty in hiring auditors than it anticipated. CBO expects that the IRS will be able to use all the mandatory funding that it designated for hiring in later years, but because of the delays in hiring and training new auditors, revenue collections from enforcement activities are smaller in CBO’s February 2024 projections than they were in its previous projections.

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