[HN Gopher] IRS gets permission to go after taxpayers who don't ...
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IRS gets permission to go after taxpayers who don't report crypto
transactions
Author : ilamont
Score : 26 points
Date : 2022-09-23 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.justice.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.justice.gov)
| Proven wrote:
| Those 87K new IRS agents Biden is hiring will be busy.
|
| They said it was to catch tax-cheating billionaires. Oops.
| "Sorry, we lied".
|
| It's time for average Americans to benefit from personalized IRS
| service! "Claw back better."
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I'm fine with them warming up by catching tax-cheating
| millionaires.
|
| Seriously, pay your taxes.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Billionaires pay for enough lawyers that they don't tax cheat.
| They tax avoid.
|
| That's a world of difference in a courtroom.
| shakezula wrote:
| The two are not mutually exclusive, and a stronger IRS is a
| good thing, no?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The average American pays their taxes, because the average
| American's taxes are collected and paid for them by their
| employer.
|
| The groups that underreport the most are contractors, followed
| by small business owners, though this usually comes in the form
| of over-claiming expenses rather than understating revenue.
|
| Wealthy taxpayers pay accountants and lawyers to do tax
| planning on them. While some of them do cheat on their taxes,
| most of them simply find ways to owe less...though as someone
| who used to provide these services, between about $500k in
| annual income and around $10 million, there's a donut hole
| where the fees paid to tax advisors and the expenses incurred
| to reduce taxes (i.e., charitable donations, etc.) usually
| exceed the savings from reduced taxes unless the client is
| willing to maintain the planning structure for 5-7 years.
| mort96 wrote:
| 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]
| cheald wrote:
| 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/ - 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jdasdf wrote:
| > 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.
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