We have a whole section of the government dedicated to figuring out whether people are evading taxes and then pursuing them for it. It could use some more funding, but that’s the appropriate way to do it.
What are you going to add by having uninformed members of the public inspecting tax returns they don’t understand? Keep in mind there are people who turn down raises because they think being in a higher tax bracket will cause them to lose money. These are the geniuses you want to catch tax evaders?
This is great (and thanks!), but if congress really cared about this stuff, they would have big teams at the IRS working on tracing sophisticated money laundering. As it is, those teams are underfunded, headed by revolving doors of people, and threatened whenever they do something bigcos don't like.
How about instead of fining them, we just create a free tax filing website at the IRS to spite them? $141MM is just the cost of doing business, and that's ridiculous.
There is no pot of gold by going after rich tax cheats. You get some headlines, but even if you seized all the wealth of Bill Gates and Elon Musk you’d fund the government (at best) for a few months.
You need to increase taxes broadly on the vast middle and lower classes to truly make a difference. It’s usually done in backhanded ways at this scale, like increasing the retirement age or the payroll tax. Direct income taxes are extremely unpopular for the people they impact, so broadly doing this is a non starter, it only works as a class warfare move (“no one under 400k income is impacted!”).
So the republicans are posturing that they will decrease funding but it won’t happen. If the IRS starts mass auditing it will be the lower and middle classes. The EITC is rife with fraud as is small business and eBay / Etsy hustlers. You audit someone and garnish their wages and they will be a lifelong hater of the IRS and all associated with them. It’s a long game.
What we need is an open, automated, auditable system where the rules are transparent. The IRS is not there to cheat you out of money, they have no incentive to do so (they don't get bonuses for that.)
On the other hand, with our present adversarial system there are a variety of private businesses that do get money when the IRS makes mistakes.
That figure covers a lot of tax fraud identity verification doesn't solve. The actual figures are around $25bn a year of stopped fraudulent refunds, at a cost of a few thousand employees [1].
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