Great article!
According to the IRS, there’s an annual $300-billion difference between what taxpayers owe and what they actually pay. About two-thirds of that is accounted for by individual underreporting, while similar misreporting by corporations and the self-employed drain the U.S. Treasury of another $88 billion.
That’s a lot of change Uncle Sam hasn’t bothered to collect. Why? One reason is a slump in IRS staffing. Over the past decade, the number of agents that perform audits has dropped by over a third. Meanwhile in 2007, in what the Syracuse University-based Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse calls a “historic collapse,” only 26 percent of corporations holding at least $250 million in assets had their books inspected — compared to more than 70 percent in 1990. (The fact that Congress outsourced debt collection to private agencies in 2004, costing the government $37 million more than such agencies manage to collect, hasn’t helped either.)
As Congress continues to batten down the fiscal hatches, here’s something else to remember: For every dollar the government devotes to IRS enforcement, another five are recouped — a five-to-one return on investment. As Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat, puts it, that’s some $300 billion in low-hanging fruit.
1 comment:
SPB I checked out the website and was shocked at the names of big businesses and famous names. Some TV Host have warrants for their arrest too. This should be a fun tax year as the instructions are so confusing it will be real easy to make mistakes. Even the team that wrote the new States laws weren't qualified so we can expect anything. It's been a good 8 years for many who support Bush/Cheney. In a way you can't blame them as the US Treasury was open for free money why not. What's a little extra money among friends.
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