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It would be wise to let IRS fund its investigations with the recovered taxes, and not on a budget.
by yason 8y ago
It would be wise to let IRS fund its investigations with the recovered taxes, and not on a budget.
- e40 8y agoThat's the last thing the ruling class of rich white folk in this country would allow.
- hueving 8y agoHow do you know? Are you privy to the minutes of the secret rich white people meetings where they decide priorities?
- zdragnar 8y agoThat would be a rather perverse incentive, since any budget surpluses could be gimmicked into new investigations into political targets.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoAmerica has something like that right now. It's called civil forfeiture. How would your idea not end up as a similar trainwreck?
- quasse 8y agoLet's take a moment to examine a similar incentive system and hopefully learn from it: Civil asset forfeiture by police, who can seize money or other assets and use them for the department. So far, the results have been widespread abuse, especially targeting people who don't have the means and clout to fight back using the legal system. No thank you.
- everybodyknows 8y agoWhat you propose creates the same incentives that pervert seized-asset finding of police: Big, easily-siezed assets become the priority, rather than gravity of the original offense.
- Glyptodon 8y agoSounds a lot like civil asset forfeiture, which has become a decidedly perverse and unjust mechanism.
- craftyguy 8y agoThat would create the exact same environment that municipalities create when they incentivize police officers to issue tickets by allowing them to keep the fees they collect.
- yason 8y agoAre you suggesting the IRS could start coming up with fraudulent charges for tax crimes and forfeit assets from individuals and companies to... well, hire more people to create more made-up charges and continue the cycle? And nobody would notice nor do anything about it? Or even happen to ask for the paper trail pointing to the original evidence? And there would be no judicial system that could step in should the whole agency start behaving irresponsibly? Alternatively, the whatever governing body that currently keeps IRS in a budget could just hand off extra money if IRS is recovering more money than it spends. But based on your logic wouldn't that also give the IRS the incentive to fabricate more tax crimes? If they knew their budget would increase the more they recover? The corollary to not funding IRS based on how much they can recover would be to systematically reduce the IRS budget each time they recover a sum of money from owed taxes. Only then the IRS are most certainly not incentivized to go after and to recover taxes left unpaid. That doesn't make sense either.