The gutting of the IRS

[packman]

Death and taxes - both inevitable as Ben Franklin said. But, the GOP is trying to avoid the finality of taxes and in the process gutting the agency responsible for the nation's money raising.

The result is a bureaucracy on life support and tens of billions in lost government revenue. ProPublica estimates a toll of at least $18 billion every year, but the true cost could easily run tens of billions of dollars higher.

The cuts are depleting the staff members who help ensure that taxpayers pay what they owe. As of last year, the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will.

The IRS conducted 675,000 fewer audits in 2017 than it did in 2010, a drop in the audit rate of 42 percent. But even those stark numbers don’t tell the whole story, say current and former IRS employees: Auditors are stretched thin, and they’re often forced to limit their investigations and move on to the next audit as quickly as they can

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted

[Me.]

1. And Yet They Continue To Target Those Who Make $20,000. A Yesr

at a higher % than those who make $200,000.

[CincyDem]

2. Low hanging fruit.

The guy making 20k/yr is less likely to have the means to fight about it and they can squeeze him hard through garnishment/bank seizures. Even at 200,000 it's pretty tough to fend them off. If you're making $2million/yr, you've probably got an accountant/lawyer who knows how to work through the system.

Gotta love the IRS - the most powerful police force in the country.

[apnu]

4. From the article

Confirms what you are saying, and oh look who's driving it: Republicans!

The story has been different for poor taxpayers. The IRS oversees one of the government’s largest anti-poverty programs, the earned income tax credit, which provides cash to the working poor. Under continued pressure from Republicans, the IRS has long made a priority of auditing people who receive that money, and as the IRS has shrunk, those audits have consumed even more resources, accounting for 36 percent of audits last year. The credit’s recipients — whose annual income is typically less than $20,000 — are now examined at rates similar to those who make $500,000 to $1 million a year. Only people with incomes above $1 million are examined much more frequently.

[Me.]

5. Interesting

I got my info from a different article so it's interesting that this one says $500.- 1 Mil.

[TheBlackAdder]

3. What pisses me off: A billionaire is treated like a pauper when it comes to audits.

.

They are not really placed in a priority review, and given a higher prevalence of being audited.

Yet, it might take 10,000 pauper audits to uncover the amount of tax avoidance of a single billionaire.

===

So, while the financial damage they can cause is multitudes higher, their chance of being audited is nearly the same.

.

[Vinca]

7. So true. They can hire teams of lawyers to make their case, but the rest of us are at the

mercy of the IRS. I nearly went into heart failure last summer when we got a notice that we owed them $9,000. It was an obvious mistake - their computer misread a 1099 - but I was terrified of being caught up as a cog in the system. Fortunately, all was resolved and we didn't owe any more, but it was still scary.

[pecosbob]

6. I'd go as far as to say that a large number of smaller businesses are run off the books

I worked for thirty years as an architectural designer. Work dried up during the recession of 2008. I ran a small one-person company for the ten years since then, but closed it recently due to a severe injury as I had to spend a couple of months recovering. I was careful during this period to keep my total income under the exemption minimum of $12,000 so as not to run afoul of tax law. You have to really be frugal to live on this amount these days. I only had to work two days a week, so for me this was semi-retirement. In a nutshell, to make the same net income on the books and maintain health-care coverage I would have had to work six days a week over that period. The only practical way to earn more would have been to expand and hire other people, thus incurring (in my mind at least) responsibility for those peoples' incomes as well. Like a squirrel in a cage, forever spinning that wheel until he drops.