Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden;Tom Williams/Parliamentary Quarterly/Zuma
america's rich deadbeat The deadbeat doesn't stop.
On Thursday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said his committee had obtained IRS data for tax years 2017 through 2020, indicating that more than 1.4 million wealthy Americans It was revealed that he had failed to submit the tax return. In total, these slackers potentially owe the government as much as $66 billion.
More than 10,000 of them were repeat offenders, Wyden wrote in a letter to the IRS commissioner. “Perhaps most worrying is the disproportionate amount of unpaid taxes owed by a small number of ultra-wealthy non-filers,” he said. Among them were 8,729 people to whom he each owed more than $500,000, of which nearly 1,000 had an annual income of more than $1 million. Wyden said the top 500 filers each year (2,000 in total) owe a total of $923 million, but only two are under active criminal investigation and have no liens. It added that only 58 people were subject to privileges or surcharges.
Clearly, tax officials have a long way to go.
“I think Americans are right to be concerned about very wealthy families using loopholes and accounting strategies to avoid paying their fair share,” Wyden told me through his staff. “The people written in this letter didn't care about that.”
Indeed, the American oligarchy and its minions have become increasingly adept at tax avoidance in recent decades, successfully shaping the tax code to suit their preferences. The wildly unpopular tax cuts that Republican leaders forced through Congress in 2017 were the result of an unprecedented lobbying frenzy by corporations and the wealthy that paid off. The nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness released a new report Wednesday based on the following information: forbes The data points out that the wealth of US billionaires has increased by 77 percent ($2.2 trillion) since the “Trump” tax cuts went into effect.
The default mode of the asset protection industry (tax lawyers, wealth managers, estate planners, etc.) is to maximize investment returns, mostly legally, sometimes illegally, while making governments rigid. was. And they often deploy strategies that fall into legal gray areas. And the legal power these billionaires wield in tax court could be overwhelming (in fact ).
Even beyond all this, some ultra-wealthy Americans have so far made a successful bet that they can simply ignore their tax obligations. Back in May 2020, the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration estimated that approximately 880,000 “high-income” non-filers owed the Treasury $46 billion for the 2014-2016 tax years. But the IRS, whose budget is systematically controlled by Republicans in Congress, released a report stating: Uprooted — there were no resources to gather. The report found that 15% of non-filer cases were closed without being inspected by IRS agents, and another third were not even due for an “investigation.”
In 2021, the IRS finally received a significant funding injection from Congress. This was fiercely opposed by Republicans, who launched a disinformation campaign to scare the public and then sought to abolish the IRS (and income tax) completely. However, Republicans succeeded in reclaiming some IRS enforcement funds as part of a recent agreement to raise the federal debt ceiling. Ironically, this move would further increase the federal deficit, according to the Congressional Research Service.
But the IRS still has a large enforcement budget, and Mr. Wyden wants the agency to use it to go after every single unfiled billionaire. “Civil and criminal enforcement, as well as monetary penalties such as liens and levies, can easily be used to collect taxes and identify such tax fraud,” he told me. added. “It now appears that the IRS has changed course and we hope they will take steps to bring those included in the new data into compliance.”
