The NYT put together a nice opinion piece of five past Secretaries of Treasuries. It describes how woefully underfunded the agency is to do it's job.
www.nytimes.com
The key paragraph:
Over the past 25 years, I.R.S. resources have been steadily cut, with the ratio of enforcement funding to returns filed falling by around 50 percent. Today, the I.R.S. has fewer auditors than at any time since World War II. Faced with resource constraints, it is no surprise that the agency is not able to appropriately focus scrutiny on complex returns, where noncompliance is greatest. Of about four million partnership returns filed in 2018, the I.R.S. audited only 140 of them. It did not pursue 300 high-income taxpayers who together cost the agency $10 billion in unpaid taxes over a three-year period when they failed to even file returns. And audit rates of those in the top 1 percent have fallen most staggeringly over the course of the past decade, such that rural counties in the Deep South have some of the highest rates of examination in the country.
If we are looking for a level playing field, I doubt it will be provided by the IRS anytime soon. There are much bigger fish to fry, and rightfully so.
Please don't make this thread political. It is not about the politics or tax rates or anything like that. This is all about what is already legally owed under current tax law that people are successfully getting away with.
Opinion | We Ran the Treasury Department. This Is How to Fix Tax Evasion.
America loses hundreds of billions of dollars to tax evasion every year. We need to give the I.R.S. the tools to combat it.
The key paragraph:
Over the past 25 years, I.R.S. resources have been steadily cut, with the ratio of enforcement funding to returns filed falling by around 50 percent. Today, the I.R.S. has fewer auditors than at any time since World War II. Faced with resource constraints, it is no surprise that the agency is not able to appropriately focus scrutiny on complex returns, where noncompliance is greatest. Of about four million partnership returns filed in 2018, the I.R.S. audited only 140 of them. It did not pursue 300 high-income taxpayers who together cost the agency $10 billion in unpaid taxes over a three-year period when they failed to even file returns. And audit rates of those in the top 1 percent have fallen most staggeringly over the course of the past decade, such that rural counties in the Deep South have some of the highest rates of examination in the country.
If we are looking for a level playing field, I doubt it will be provided by the IRS anytime soon. There are much bigger fish to fry, and rightfully so.
Please don't make this thread political. It is not about the politics or tax rates or anything like that. This is all about what is already legally owed under current tax law that people are successfully getting away with.
