Thank You, IRS?

How much work is it for the government to take the money, shutdown a business, etc. Enforcement should be pretty easy with the tools they have.

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38 million? Out of the whole US?
Don’t we have a couple posters here who are worth almost as much as that?

This enforcement action seems to be focusing on small niche in Puerto Rico.

roughly 100 high-income people tried to get favorable tax treatment through Puerto Rico without meeting certain tax requirements. Many of those cases are expected to face criminal investigation.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/irs-probes-puerto-rico-tax-090000247.html

Maybe we got better tax accountants and lawyers :rofl:

Small fishes, what about the whales (billionaires)?

It’s hard to win against but they should try.

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Inside a Sales Army Turning a Tax Break Into a Modern-Day Gold Rush

Thousands of individuals are referring neighbors and local businesses to a firm that has pursued billions in IRS refunds and created a bonanza for itself

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Since @manch keeps bragging about CA has the highest number of millionaires, it follows that Californians are the biggest tax evaders. Use the AI tools created by Californians against Californians :slight_smile:

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Stating obvious facts is not bragging.

:man_shrugging:

The biggest cheaters are the poor and middle class who claim deductions that they’re not entitled to. The rich face higher stakes and can afford accountants who find way to legally dodge tax. I’m skeptical about the existence of any supposed IRS windfall from going after the rich. The occasional cheats are low enough in number that they just don’t amount to much in terms of revenues. To fix the problem we’d need to attack the maze of legal deductions and simplify the tax code. Ideally one moderately sized standard deduction for everyone and no itemized deductions for anything. Or maybe a VAT. Will never happen.

I’ve been advocate for years for a flat % income tax with standard deductions for the poverty line, so it’d auto index based on household size and inflation. Taxes would be super simple without the tens of thousands of pages of tax code. Of course, every special interest group who’s gotten special treatment in the tax code would be against it. It has a 0% change of being reality. It’d take ~15% flat rate to replace the current system’s revenue.

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It’s too complex. Remember when, Geithner was nominated to be Treasury Secretary? It turned out he owed back taxes for incorrectly reporting income from an IMF position. The guy ended up with the IRS reporting to him. Yet, the tax code was too complex for him and whoever does his taxes.

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“The tax gap associated with illegal activities has been outside the scope of tax gap estimation because the objective of government is to eliminate those activities, which would eliminate any associated tax.”
Consumption taxes go a long way to eliminating this problem. Every drug dealer pimp and thief pays taxes taxes when they spend their ill-gotten gains.

No way. I wonder how many billions were lit on fire due to fraud with all the handout programs.