4 ms·

I never understood this "They're gearing up the IRS to get regular working Americans!" thing. Most normal people pay their taxes, right? The people who are skir

by mort96 4y ago

I never understood this "They're gearing up the IRS to get regular working Americans!" thing. Most normal people pay their taxes, right? The people who are skirting around taxes are usually the ultra wealthy elite, right? Also, where's the 87k number coming from? The treasury department got funding which lets them hire about 87k new employees by 2031, but most of those aren't going to be IRS agents. The number also doesn't account for the number of employees you need to just keep the number of employees steady; people quit and get fired and retire.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cheald 4y ago
The ultra wealthy elite are generally already under intense scrutiny and accordingly tend to pay an army of tax layers and accountants to ensure everything is buttoned up. Poorer people are significantly more likely to be audited: https://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/679/ https://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/679/ - I suspect that it's not that the IRS likes going after poorer people specifically, but that they're more successful in extracting money from people with less money to pay professionals to structure their finances and tax strategy or to defend themselves from an audit.
- jeremysalwen 4y ago
  From the article linked you can see that the number of millionares audited has been steadily going down in recent years. The article explains it as: > A critical limitation in the IRS’s ability to audit millionaires is the availability of IRS revenue agents. Only this class of auditors, given sufficient training and experience, are qualified to examine complex tax returns – the types of returns typically filed by high-income individuals and large-scale businesses. > With severe budget constraints, IRS has tended to trade off the replacement of revenue agents with hiring more tax examiners. These certainly are paid less, but they are also less knowledgeable. While revenue agents used to outnumber tax examiners, this has slowly shifted over time. > Since the end of FY 2010, the number of IRS revenue agents has dropped by 41 percent. Initially, the number of tax examiners also fell although not at the same rate. By FY 2016, tax examiners began to outnumber revenue agents for the first time. During FY 2020 and FY 2021, major increases took place in the hiring of tax examiners. Thus, the number of tax examiners has regained all of their lost ground and were actually 1 percent higher than in 2010. See Figure 4 and Table 3.
- csomar 4y ago
  It's neither the ultra-wealthy or the poor the government is after. It's the middle-class who owns businesses. Middle-class working a salaried job pay well over their fair share of taxes. They can't, for the most part, do any deductions. Middle-class who owns a business (think a Coffeshop, a dental clinic, a small construction contractor, etc...). These medium-small businesses are ripping the IRS big time. With mundane things like claiming everything as deductible, to accepting some cash on the side, to doing the odd unreported transaction, etc... There are some restaurants in the US that accept only Cash. I don't think the owners of these joints knows what the IRS stands for.
  - swiley-gin 4y ago
    There is no group the current elites hate more than the middle class. The middle class pays enough attention and has just enough power to make them uncomfortable when they do nasty things. The goal of the current elites is to either materially destroy the middle class or to make them poor.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  It's generally still not buttoned up. Looks buttoned up. Doesn't make one fuck of sense. What is going on? IRS has limited staff for those cases, can only really nail 200 a year.
jdasdf 4y ago
> Most normal people pay their taxes, right? The people who are skirting around taxes are usually the ultra wealthy elite, right? Wrong on both marks. The bulk of tax evasion, both in amount evaded and number of incidents is at the lower end of income. Every waiter that doesn't report their tips, every side gig, every commingling to the small businesses funds they own, etc... The ultra rich are audited every other year, and have an army of tax accountants going over every single thing to make sure the report is accurate and compliant with the law. There is no "wealthy elite dodging taxes and taking money out of the poor people mouths", there is only a morally bankrupt lower class whose every accusation of malfeasance is a confession.
- pelagicAustral 4y ago
  > There is no "wealthy elite dodging taxes and taking money out of the poor people mouths" Well, I don't know about I that. I think they just have access to far more sophisticated ways to avoid taxes [0]. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers
rufus_foreman 4y ago
>> The people who are skirting around taxes are usually the ultra wealthy elite, right? No, not right. There are relatively few ultra wealthy elite. 25 million people or families claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the IRS estimates that about a quarter of the payments for EITC claims were issued improperly in 2020. The IRS doesn't have the ability to verify the claims in an automated way since they don't have the data on child eligibility and not all income is reported by employers. So if they are going to get compliance, they would need to audit on a massive scale.
- atdrummond 4y ago
  I’d argue just as Patio11 argues that zero payment fraud is a suboptimal amount of payment fraud, so too is zero tax fraud. And in the case of taxes, the losses (movement to low tax jurisdictions, winding down of enterprises, expending less hours on labour at the margin, etc) begin to heavily outweigh the gains (in marginal income) well before the “zero tax fraud” point.

by mort96 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cheald 4y ago

The ultra wealthy elite are generally already under intense scrutiny and accordingly tend to pay an army of tax layers and accountants to ensure everything is buttoned up. Poorer people are significantly more likely to be audited: https://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/679/ https://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/679/ - I suspect that it's not that the IRS likes going after poorer people specifically, but that they're more successful in extracting money from people with less money to pay professionals to structure their finances and tax strategy or to defend themselves from an audit.

jeremysalwen 4y ago
From the article linked you can see that the number of millionares audited has been steadily going down in recent years. The article explains it as: > A critical limitation in the IRS’s ability to audit millionaires is the availability of IRS revenue agents. Only this class of auditors, given sufficient training and experience, are qualified to examine complex tax returns – the types of returns typically filed by high-income individuals and large-scale businesses. > With severe budget constraints, IRS has tended to trade off the replacement of revenue agents with hiring more tax examiners. These certainly are paid less, but they are also less knowledgeable. While revenue agents used to outnumber tax examiners, this has slowly shifted over time. > Since the end of FY 2010, the number of IRS revenue agents has dropped by 41 percent. Initially, the number of tax examiners also fell although not at the same rate. By FY 2016, tax examiners began to outnumber revenue agents for the first time. During FY 2020 and FY 2021, major increases took place in the hiring of tax examiners. Thus, the number of tax examiners has regained all of their lost ground and were actually 1 percent higher than in 2010. See Figure 4 and Table 3.
csomar 4y ago
It's neither the ultra-wealthy or the poor the government is after. It's the middle-class who owns businesses. Middle-class working a salaried job pay well over their fair share of taxes. They can't, for the most part, do any deductions. Middle-class who owns a business (think a Coffeshop, a dental clinic, a small construction contractor, etc...). These medium-small businesses are ripping the IRS big time. With mundane things like claiming everything as deductible, to accepting some cash on the side, to doing the odd unreported transaction, etc... There are some restaurants in the US that accept only Cash. I don't think the owners of these joints knows what the IRS stands for.
- swiley-gin 4y ago
  There is no group the current elites hate more than the middle class. The middle class pays enough attention and has just enough power to make them uncomfortable when they do nasty things. The goal of the current elites is to either materially destroy the middle class or to make them poor.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
It's generally still not buttoned up. Looks buttoned up. Doesn't make one fuck of sense. What is going on? IRS has limited staff for those cases, can only really nail 200 a year.

jdasdf 4y ago

> Most normal people pay their taxes, right? The people who are skirting around taxes are usually the ultra wealthy elite, right? Wrong on both marks. The bulk of tax evasion, both in amount evaded and number of incidents is at the lower end of income. Every waiter that doesn't report their tips, every side gig, every commingling to the small businesses funds they own, etc... The ultra rich are audited every other year, and have an army of tax accountants going over every single thing to make sure the report is accurate and compliant with the law. There is no "wealthy elite dodging taxes and taking money out of the poor people mouths", there is only a morally bankrupt lower class whose every accusation of malfeasance is a confession.

pelagicAustral 4y ago
> There is no "wealthy elite dodging taxes and taking money out of the poor people mouths" Well, I don't know about I that. I think they just have access to far more sophisticated ways to avoid taxes [0]. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers

rufus_foreman 4y ago

>> The people who are skirting around taxes are usually the ultra wealthy elite, right? No, not right. There are relatively few ultra wealthy elite. 25 million people or families claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the IRS estimates that about a quarter of the payments for EITC claims were issued improperly in 2020. The IRS doesn't have the ability to verify the claims in an automated way since they don't have the data on child eligibility and not all income is reported by employers. So if they are going to get compliance, they would need to audit on a massive scale.

atdrummond 4y ago
I’d argue just as Patio11 argues that zero payment fraud is a suboptimal amount of payment fraud, so too is zero tax fraud. And in the case of taxes, the losses (movement to low tax jurisdictions, winding down of enterprises, expending less hours on labour at the margin, etc) begin to heavily outweigh the gains (in marginal income) well before the “zero tax fraud” point.