The beefed-up enforcement is part of the agency’s modernization initiative aimed at improving customer service and catching wealthy tax evaders.
  • Neato@ttrpg.networkEnglish
    138·
    4 months ago

    If auditing millionaires generated a billion dollars, then it stands that auditing billionaires should generate a trillion dollars! /s

    Only a little sarcastic, we should audit the shit out of them.

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
    40·
    4 months ago

    Clearly a waste of money harassing upstanding innovators and job creators. IRS needs to stop wasting money and agent’s time on harassment like this. Defund the IRS.

    /s in case it’s not obvious

    • Mike D.
      5·
      4 months ago

      This was the low hanging fruit. The good stuff takes a little more work.

  • Maeve@kbin.earth
    91·
    4 months ago

    I wonder how many were close to $1 mm and how many were closer or > $1 Bn?

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    7·
    4 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The Biden administration’s yearlong effort to crack down on delinquent rich taxpayers has yielded $1 billion, a milestone that the Treasury Department said on Thursday was the result of beefed-up enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service.

    The Biden administration, which initially signed a law giving $80 billion to the agency, continues to contend with attempts by Republicans in Congress to claw back more of the money.

    “Efforts to increase tax fairness and bring in revenue from high-end taxpayers who have not paid what they owe are already paying off to the American people,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said during a briefing with reporters.

    commissioner, said that because of the agency’s larger enforcement staff, it has been able to focus on tracking down and sending letters to wealthy taxpayers who owe money.

    And it has been ramping up audits of hedge funds and real estate investment partnerships and cracking down on abuse of corporate jets for personal travel.

    had been too slow to resolve identify theft cases and that it was not doing a good enough job answering the phones when taxpayers called with questions.

    The original article contains 453 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • KevonLooney
      141·
      4 months ago

      None because the reporting requirement for the IRS is $600. It sounds like you don’t know anything about taxes, so everyone can safely ignore your replies.

      https://www.cnbc.com/select/irs-600-reporting-rule-delayed/

      The real question is, why hasn’t trump said anything about this? Just today I saw people saying he’s slowed down and is not up to the task of being president. Biden is obviously fine, because he’s got a good team running the IRS. Where’s trump and why hasn’t he said anything about this?

  • Twinkletoes
    234·
    4 months ago

    Wait so we spent $80 billion dollars to recoup $1 billion dollars?! 😵‍💫

    • MrVilliam@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      4 months ago

      Nope. $60B was allocated to the IRS. They’ve spent $5.7B of it so far, most of which I’m assuming was for hiring and getting their ducks in a row to start being able to go after the big fish. It’s actually pretty impressive that they’ve found so much revenue in such a short amount of time that would’ve just not been collected.

      It’s from January, but here’s some other info on this that’s a little more in depth than that shitty nyt article.

    • HONEYBADGER517@sh.itjust.works
      21·
      4 months ago

      Not exactly. Per the article only 5.7 bil of the 80 bil has been spent so far. Also per the article, 20bil has also been cut from that total in budget negotiations. And, not all of that goes to tracking down mil/billionaires. An unspecified amount goes to modernizing their systems and improving their ability to respond to calls from taxpayers.

      I imagine there are plenty of things not listed that they are doing to improve their resources with the money. Id wager that given time we’ll see larger returns on investment as they get through their backlog of unpaid taxes. But that’s just my opinion.

    • AlternatePersonMan@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 months ago

      So far $5.7 billion has been spent. The total approved funds were actually $60 billion. That ratio does seem sketchy, but the article mentions the money will be spent on other upgrades as well, such as customer service, though it fails to go into much detail.

      I recall reading that increasing IRS funds tend to yield significantly higher earnings, but the article doesn’t provide any depth there. The proposal mentions that they expect to bring in $200 billion. That sounds disappointingly low to me. I was hoping for something more like a 10-1 return, but I imagine auditing those armed to dodge taxes isn’t easy.

      • barkingspiders@infosec.pubEnglish
        51·
        4 months ago

        It can take time too. One of the ways rich people skirt taxes is paying lawyers to drag things out in court. IRS doesn’t just have to hire new people to do complicated audits on rich people, they also have to pay lawyers to enforce their findings in the courts. Ramping up new agents to handle the audits and going through any court procedures can take years.