5 ms·

IRS: billions in overdue/unpaid taxes to be collected with new funding

46 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

ryaniscool 3y ago
What some people may not realize is the shrinking of the IRS started from a backlash of well-documented abuses by the agency that peaked in the 80's I'm very cynical of "but this time it will be different, we're going after the rich!". Anyone who has ever dealt with government bureacrats, knows that they generally end up following the path of least resistance which in this case will be the middle class.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Please don’t make excuses for properly funding tax collection of legitimate taxes owed. If you want independent oversight, implement it. I pay all of my taxes due, and I expect the same from other taxpayers, regardless of income bracket and total tax liability.
  - ryaniscool 3y ago
    There is independent oversight through the tax courts but your typical person off the street can't afford to defend themselves from the united states government. You have an idealistic assumption that people who are targeted for audits or fines are all guilty of tax fraud. This isn't true. Sometimes is just a matter of them losing supporting documentation.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      I have had non filing and delinquent tax issues with the IRS due to life events. I have been audited. I have no complaints, and resolved all issues directly with the IRS without professional representation. They are civil servants doing a necessary but usually unpleasant job, collecting taxes that pay for civilization. Disclosing my bias, I like civilization funded.
      - ryaniscool 3y ago
        Your experience is anecdotal. Here's an anecdotal horror story to counter it https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/politics/rules-change-on-irs-seizures-too-late-for-some.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/politics/rules-change-... The political narrative is that the IRS will be on the front lines of the battle for social equity and maybe that's the intention but I've personally experienced the realities of government bureaucracy and the overreach of federal law enforcement.
  - Syonyk 3y ago
    > I pay all of my taxes due, and I expect the same from other taxpayers... What are "taxes due"? And at what point does "Creative-but-legal accounting" turn into "Tax fraud"? The tax code is complex and arcane enough that if you give a suitably complicated set of taxes to several different tax preparers, they will almost certainly all come back with different numbers - all of which are "correct," in the sense of being compliant with tax code. But at some point, which honestly isn't that much annual income, it becomes worth having your own private accountant to wrangle your side businesses and such for the tax benefits. A friend of mine did this out of college (accounting/finance major) - on paper, he was responsible for doing some freight routing for trainloads of raw materials, but in reality he was about 25% that and 75% "keeping up with the details of the company owner's side businesses, all of which were legal and legitimate, but all of which served as tax breaks for the owner's hobbies." Hunting guide company? A reasonable amount of your firearms expenses are tax deductible for training, practice, equipment evaluation, etc. Fishing company? Same for a lot of your boat expenses and such. I'm not sure if that really needs fixing or not, but a $50k/yr dedicated accountant is cheaper than taxes fairly quickly. Especially if they can do other work for you too.
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  > a backlash of well-documented abuses by the agency that peaked in the 80's If they're well-documented it's not here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_allegations_of_misuse_of_the_Internal_Revenue_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_allegations_of_misuse_... or here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Service
- throwway120385 3y ago
  The backlash in the 80's probably should have involved a simplification of the tax code instead of defunding the IRS.
- standardUser 3y ago
  That's unfounded speculation that goes against the explicit statements made by the IRS. Knee-jerk cynicism is not a replacement for facts.
- zie 3y ago
  There is def. a middle ground we have to find here, but underfunding for decades is definitely not the right place to be either. If you have ever had to call the IRS in the last decade and get anything at all done, you will find it nearly impossible to do. Their system is down, or the one person on the planet that knows how to do X is on vacation, so call back in a few weeks, etc. So you go through your congress critter, and hope they can find the right person for you, which they generally manage to do, but it takes them 6 months. Or in my case, I have an issue from 2019 still pending. My congress critter has even changed, so I have to re-initiate and start the process all over again whenever that happens. Luckily it's a case where they owe me a little money and I don't really need it. The IRS desperately needs the funding. But of course they could become over-funded and cause stupid ridiculous problems in the other direction.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  So we should defund any agency that has had well-documented abuses in the past 40 years?
- webwielder2 3y ago
  What's well-documented is Republican affinity for wealthy tax cheats and opposition to good governance.
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
While people will be worrying about whether they will be shaking down regular tax payers, the ultimate goal is to claw back the pandemic PPP loans that were fraudulently requested and not paid back. They've only started reviewing these and there's a lot more for them to grind through. The question however is how long it will take them to go through each loan.
- rjbwork 3y ago
  I don't know if this is true, but I certainly hope it is. That whole PPP thing is one of the biggest upward transfers of wealth this country has ever seen. Disgusting.
wnevets 3y ago
> earlier this month the IRS announced that it had recouped half a billion dollars in back taxes from rich tax cheats. I can't wait to be told why this is a bad thing.
- dheera 3y ago
  When the rich get overtaxed, the hardworking-and-still-budget-strapped middle class often gets overtaxed as well, and the poor suffer for the lessened spending power of all of the above. More money in the hands of an efficient government isn't always a good thing.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Letting tax evaders operate is a tax break for criminals, not even for rich people.
    - dheera 3y ago
      If you tax people less, they have less incentive to evade.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - whatshisface 3y ago
        The money obtained from making criminals pay could fund tax cuts for everyone who was, previously, shouldering the whole burden of society alone.
        vuln 3y ago
        The criminals are running the government. If you or I did anything like the congress critters we’d be jailed (just look at insider trading).
  - MSFT_Edging 3y ago
panarky 3y ago
One might think that people who claim their priority is "law and order" would strongly support enforcing existing laws without fear or favor. One might think that people who claim their priority is reducing the budget deficit would strongly support spending tens of billions to increase revenues by hundreds of billions. But when we observe that people's actions contradict their claims, we should stop believing their claims.
- vuln 3y ago
  Yeah it’s wild that people getting rich off insider trading don’t want to raise taxes on themselves. How many millionaires are in the Senate and House? How many made their millions in their government position?
- edgyquant 3y ago
  We have a spending problem, not an income problem. Taking more of people’s money isn’t going to solve the core problem that our spending needs serious cuts. You think your political opponents are bad faith actors because you’ve never actually listened to their core beliefs and only know about them through a lense painted by their opposition who favor bigger government. Conservatives want the government cut down significantly, not to find creative ways to get more money.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    Perhaps we can derive the core beliefs of the Republican party from their 2020 platform. Given that that is how political parties typically express such things, it seems reasonable.
    - jfengel 3y ago
      The joke here being that they didn't have a 2020 platform. “RESOLVED, That the Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention.” https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_2020.pdf https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_202... Strictly, that meant that the 2016 platform remained in force, and they blamed the inability to derive a new one on COVID. But it doesn't speak particularly well of them not to be seriously considering the fundamental statement of what it is the party wants to do.
cheekibreeki2 3y ago
What's the point if they're gonna squander them on war.
tmaly 3y ago
If we are running 3 trillion in deficit spending a year, and at current rate we likely will never pay down the deficit, Why do we still need to tax the working poor?
- rabuse 3y ago
  Because they can't fight back... the rich have the means to just make it disappear.
  - vuln 3y ago
    The Rich have to write and vote on the bill that will raise their taxes.
thegrim33 3y ago
Meta: Why are there multiple political / social commentary posts on every page of HN now? Was it always like this, or is it worse now? If you want to read social/political "news", well, literally every other media source in existence can provide those stories for you. Why on Hacker News? It'll just be a comment thread of political arguing.
- j-j-j-j 3y ago
  [flagged]
- 23B1 3y ago
  The technologists that read HN have created a surveillance panopticon that will make it very easy for the state to go after unpaid taxes – particularly those who can't afford the army of accountants, laywers, and lobbyists required to hide their income, offshore their businesses, or otherwise avoid paying their fair share. SV techbros will happily sell your data to whichever tyrant is paying, including the federal government. https://www.csis.org/analysis/surveillance-sale https://www.csis.org/analysis/surveillance-sale https://epic.org/issues/consumer-privacy/data-brokers/ https://epic.org/issues/consumer-privacy/data-brokers/ https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/how-your-online-data-is-being-abused-to-surveil-you-and-violate-your-freedoms https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/how-your-online-data-... https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-releases-documents-confirming-the-nsa-buys-americans-internet-browsing-records-calls-on-intelligence-community-to-stop-buying-us-data-obtained-unlawfully-from-data-brokers-violating-recent-ftc-order https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-relea...
- h2odragon 3y ago
  Propaganda spreads to pollute all available niches.
- palmfacehn 3y ago
  Agreed. It is always posts repeating left/center-left dogmas. Agree or disagree, fine. It is also fair to dismiss the entire exercise as meaningless bickering. However I find it hard to describe this as "intellectual curiosity", when the discussion is narrowly limited to specific brands of sloganeering. Entire books have been written on some of the common disputes arising on this site. There's rarely anything new added in the usual short comments here. Most commonly I read a pop culture interpretation/regurgitation of the same concepts. Perhaps it was something a talking head repeated somewhere? When I have made the mistake of engaging, I'll cite an author or perhaps link a short article by the same author summarizing some of the points. Inevitably, posters will smear the source for having, "an agenda". As if all of politics isn't framed from within "agendas". It is bad enough on explicitly partisan posts like this one, but I'm also noticing politics creeping into other benign areas. A discussion about Google's practices will always lead down the rabbit hole of "more regulation and government can solve that!". Observations around the business cycle, state managed economy and how these factors fuel monopolies are less welcome. Perhaps John Oliver didn't give those talking points.
j-j-j-j 3y ago
[flagged]
from-nibly 3y ago
If the government needs funding to get money. Should I be able to invest in that venture?

46 points by MilnerRoute 3y ago

What some people may not realize is the shrinking of the IRS started from a backlash of well-documented abuses by the agency that peaked in the 80's I'm very cynical of "but this time it will be different, we're going after the rich!". Anyone who has ever dealt with government bureacrats, knows that they generally end up following the path of least resistance which in this case will be the middle class.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Please don’t make excuses for properly funding tax collection of legitimate taxes owed. If you want independent oversight, implement it. I pay all of my taxes due, and I expect the same from other taxpayers, regardless of income bracket and total tax liability.
- ryaniscool 3y ago
  There is independent oversight through the tax courts but your typical person off the street can't afford to defend themselves from the united states government. You have an idealistic assumption that people who are targeted for audits or fines are all guilty of tax fraud. This isn't true. Sometimes is just a matter of them losing supporting documentation.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    I have had non filing and delinquent tax issues with the IRS due to life events. I have been audited. I have no complaints, and resolved all issues directly with the IRS without professional representation. They are civil servants doing a necessary but usually unpleasant job, collecting taxes that pay for civilization. Disclosing my bias, I like civilization funded.
    - ryaniscool 3y ago
      Your experience is anecdotal. Here's an anecdotal horror story to counter it https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/politics/rules-change-on-irs-seizures-too-late-for-some.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/politics/rules-change-... The political narrative is that the IRS will be on the front lines of the battle for social equity and maybe that's the intention but I've personally experienced the realities of government bureaucracy and the overreach of federal law enforcement.
- Syonyk 3y ago
  > I pay all of my taxes due, and I expect the same from other taxpayers... What are "taxes due"? And at what point does "Creative-but-legal accounting" turn into "Tax fraud"? The tax code is complex and arcane enough that if you give a suitably complicated set of taxes to several different tax preparers, they will almost certainly all come back with different numbers - all of which are "correct," in the sense of being compliant with tax code. But at some point, which honestly isn't that much annual income, it becomes worth having your own private accountant to wrangle your side businesses and such for the tax benefits. A friend of mine did this out of college (accounting/finance major) - on paper, he was responsible for doing some freight routing for trainloads of raw materials, but in reality he was about 25% that and 75% "keeping up with the details of the company owner's side businesses, all of which were legal and legitimate, but all of which served as tax breaks for the owner's hobbies." Hunting guide company? A reasonable amount of your firearms expenses are tax deductible for training, practice, equipment evaluation, etc. Fishing company? Same for a lot of your boat expenses and such. I'm not sure if that really needs fixing or not, but a $50k/yr dedicated accountant is cheaper than taxes fairly quickly. Especially if they can do other work for you too.
bigbillheck 3y ago
> a backlash of well-documented abuses by the agency that peaked in the 80's If they're well-documented it's not here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_allegations_of_misuse_of_the_Internal_Revenue_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_allegations_of_misuse_... or here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Service
throwway120385 3y ago
The backlash in the 80's probably should have involved a simplification of the tax code instead of defunding the IRS.
standardUser 3y ago
That's unfounded speculation that goes against the explicit statements made by the IRS. Knee-jerk cynicism is not a replacement for facts.
zie 3y ago
There is def. a middle ground we have to find here, but underfunding for decades is definitely not the right place to be either. If you have ever had to call the IRS in the last decade and get anything at all done, you will find it nearly impossible to do. Their system is down, or the one person on the planet that knows how to do X is on vacation, so call back in a few weeks, etc. So you go through your congress critter, and hope they can find the right person for you, which they generally manage to do, but it takes them 6 months. Or in my case, I have an issue from 2019 still pending. My congress critter has even changed, so I have to re-initiate and start the process all over again whenever that happens. Luckily it's a case where they owe me a little money and I don't really need it. The IRS desperately needs the funding. But of course they could become over-funded and cause stupid ridiculous problems in the other direction.
bcrosby95 3y ago
So we should defund any agency that has had well-documented abuses in the past 40 years?
webwielder2 3y ago
What's well-documented is Republican affinity for wealthy tax cheats and opposition to good governance.

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

While people will be worrying about whether they will be shaking down regular tax payers, the ultimate goal is to claw back the pandemic PPP loans that were fraudulently requested and not paid back. They've only started reviewing these and there's a lot more for them to grind through. The question however is how long it will take them to go through each loan.

rjbwork 3y ago
I don't know if this is true, but I certainly hope it is. That whole PPP thing is one of the biggest upward transfers of wealth this country has ever seen. Disgusting.

wnevets 3y ago

> earlier this month the IRS announced that it had recouped half a billion dollars in back taxes from rich tax cheats. I can't wait to be told why this is a bad thing.

dheera 3y ago
When the rich get overtaxed, the hardworking-and-still-budget-strapped middle class often gets overtaxed as well, and the poor suffer for the lessened spending power of all of the above. More money in the hands of an efficient government isn't always a good thing.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Letting tax evaders operate is a tax break for criminals, not even for rich people.
  - dheera 3y ago
    If you tax people less, they have less incentive to evade.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      The money obtained from making criminals pay could fund tax cuts for everyone who was, previously, shouldering the whole burden of society alone.
      - vuln 3y ago
        The criminals are running the government. If you or I did anything like the congress critters we’d be jailed (just look at insider trading).
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago

panarky 3y ago

One might think that people who claim their priority is "law and order" would strongly support enforcing existing laws without fear or favor. One might think that people who claim their priority is reducing the budget deficit would strongly support spending tens of billions to increase revenues by hundreds of billions. But when we observe that people's actions contradict their claims, we should stop believing their claims.

vuln 3y ago
Yeah it’s wild that people getting rich off insider trading don’t want to raise taxes on themselves. How many millionaires are in the Senate and House? How many made their millions in their government position?
edgyquant 3y ago
We have a spending problem, not an income problem. Taking more of people’s money isn’t going to solve the core problem that our spending needs serious cuts. You think your political opponents are bad faith actors because you’ve never actually listened to their core beliefs and only know about them through a lense painted by their opposition who favor bigger government. Conservatives want the government cut down significantly, not to find creative ways to get more money.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Perhaps we can derive the core beliefs of the Republican party from their 2020 platform. Given that that is how political parties typically express such things, it seems reasonable.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    The joke here being that they didn't have a 2020 platform. “RESOLVED, That the Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention.” https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_2020.pdf https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_202... Strictly, that meant that the 2016 platform remained in force, and they blamed the inability to derive a new one on COVID. But it doesn't speak particularly well of them not to be seriously considering the fundamental statement of what it is the party wants to do.

cheekibreeki2 3y ago

What's the point if they're gonna squander them on war.

tmaly 3y ago

If we are running 3 trillion in deficit spending a year, and at current rate we likely will never pay down the deficit, Why do we still need to tax the working poor?

rabuse 3y ago
Because they can't fight back... the rich have the means to just make it disappear.
- vuln 3y ago
  The Rich have to write and vote on the bill that will raise their taxes.

thegrim33 3y ago

Meta: Why are there multiple political / social commentary posts on every page of HN now? Was it always like this, or is it worse now? If you want to read social/political "news", well, literally every other media source in existence can provide those stories for you. Why on Hacker News? It'll just be a comment thread of political arguing.

j-j-j-j 3y ago
[flagged]
23B1 3y ago
The technologists that read HN have created a surveillance panopticon that will make it very easy for the state to go after unpaid taxes – particularly those who can't afford the army of accountants, laywers, and lobbyists required to hide their income, offshore their businesses, or otherwise avoid paying their fair share. SV techbros will happily sell your data to whichever tyrant is paying, including the federal government. https://www.csis.org/analysis/surveillance-sale https://www.csis.org/analysis/surveillance-sale https://epic.org/issues/consumer-privacy/data-brokers/ https://epic.org/issues/consumer-privacy/data-brokers/ https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/how-your-online-data-is-being-abused-to-surveil-you-and-violate-your-freedoms https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/how-your-online-data-... https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-releases-documents-confirming-the-nsa-buys-americans-internet-browsing-records-calls-on-intelligence-community-to-stop-buying-us-data-obtained-unlawfully-from-data-brokers-violating-recent-ftc-order https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-relea...
h2odragon 3y ago
Propaganda spreads to pollute all available niches.
palmfacehn 3y ago
Agreed. It is always posts repeating left/center-left dogmas. Agree or disagree, fine. It is also fair to dismiss the entire exercise as meaningless bickering. However I find it hard to describe this as "intellectual curiosity", when the discussion is narrowly limited to specific brands of sloganeering. Entire books have been written on some of the common disputes arising on this site. There's rarely anything new added in the usual short comments here. Most commonly I read a pop culture interpretation/regurgitation of the same concepts. Perhaps it was something a talking head repeated somewhere? When I have made the mistake of engaging, I'll cite an author or perhaps link a short article by the same author summarizing some of the points. Inevitably, posters will smear the source for having, "an agenda". As if all of politics isn't framed from within "agendas". It is bad enough on explicitly partisan posts like this one, but I'm also noticing politics creeping into other benign areas. A discussion about Google's practices will always lead down the rabbit hole of "more regulation and government can solve that!". Observations around the business cycle, state managed economy and how these factors fuel monopolies are less welcome. Perhaps John Oliver didn't give those talking points.

j-j-j-j 3y ago

[flagged]

from-nibly 3y ago

If the government needs funding to get money. Should I be able to invest in that venture?