Posted on 10/02/2019 1:31:15 PM PDT by Red Badger
Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to.
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he IRS audits the working poor at about the same rate as the wealthiest 1%. Now, in response to questions from a U.S. senator, the IRS has acknowledged that’s true but professes it can’t change anything unless it is given more money.
ProPublica reported the disproportionate audit focus on lower-income families in April. Lawmakers confronted IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig about the emphasis, citing our stories, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Rettig for a plan to fix the imbalance. Rettig readily agreed.
Last month, Rettig replied with a report, but it said the IRS has no plan and won’t have one until Congress agrees to restore the funding it slashed from the agency over the past nine years — something lawmakers have shown little inclination to do.
On the one hand, the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits — of which there were about 380,000 last year, accounting for 39% of the total the IRS conducted — are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time, either. They are “the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources,” Rettig’s report says.
On the other hand, auditing the rich is hard. It takes senior auditors hours upon hours to complete an exam. What’s more, the letter says, “the rate of attrition is significantly higher among these more experienced examiners.” As a result, the budget cuts have hit this part of the IRS particularly hard.
For now, the IRS says, while it agrees auditing more wealthy taxpayers would be a good idea, without adequate funding there’s nothing it can do. “Congress must fund and the IRS must hire and train appropriate numbers of [auditors] to have appropriately balanced coverage across all income levels,” the report said.
Since 2011, Republicans in Congress have driven cuts to the IRS enforcement budget; it’s more than a quarter lower than its 2010 level, adjusting for inflation.
Recently, bipartisan support has emerged in both the House and Senate for increasing enforcement spending, but the proposals on the table are relatively modest and would not restore the budget to pre-cut levels. However, even a proposed small increase might not come to pass, because it’s unclear whether Congress will actually pass any appropriations bills this year.
In response to Rettig’s letter, Wyden agreed in a statement that the IRS needs more money, “but that does not eliminate the need for the agency to begin reversing the alarming trend of plummeting audit rates of the wealthy within its current budget.”
Poor people can’t afford lawyers and accountants the way rich people can. They are disarmed.
IRS people know better than screw with Corrupt American Oligarchs.
that’s equivalent to busting the corner hoods selling loosies on the corner instead of going after the Don ...
ProPublica is a left-wing think tank.
However, they are right about this.
That’s why I posted it................Blind acorn finds squirrel..............
If cheating on your taxes is randomly distributed and there are hundreds of more poor people than rich, I would expect the poor to be in more audits.
People often use statistics incorrectly. You often hear the fact that the percentage of blacks in jail is high than that of white, and they point to that as a clear indication of discrimination. It seems those facts are also consistent with the fact that blacks have a higher incidence of crime and more readily participate in criminal activity than whites. That’s not racist or discrimination. It’s simply a fact.
Nightmare to audit wealthy people. Just make tax code simpler...that is the only fix.
It’s true, I was told by a tax lawyer that I could probably beat an audit where the IRS said I owed about $2000, but it would cost me substantially more than that in legal fees.
Mark
Did you know that if you call the IRS Help Line [Good luck getting thru] and you ask a question of THEM, and as a result of THEIR ANSWER to you, you file a return that gets audited and their answer was wrong, you still owe the tax, even though you asked them first about the subject?
They do not help you.
The person giving the wrong answer is not affected in any way.
They are safe.
You are not..................
Did you know that if you call the IRS Help Line [Good luck getting thru] and you ask a question of THEM, and as a result of THEIR ANSWER to you, you file a return that gets audited and their answer was wrong, you still owe the tax, even though you asked them first about the subject?
They do not help you.
The person giving the wrong answer is not affected in any way.
They are safe.
You are not..................
“If cheating on your taxes is randomly distributed and there are hundreds of more poor people than rich, I would expect the poor to be in more audits.”
But the amount of tax that the poor avoid is much less than the amount that the rich avoid.
It is probably better to go after the 1 person avoiding $1 million rather than 1000 people avoiding $1,000
Facts be racis.........................
That’s a hell of an answer, if true. If the rich pay 80/90 percent of the taxes, you would think they would get more bang for their buck by auditing them.
The IRS makes it up in volume.........................
The poor taxpayer can't afford a CPA to prepare the return, so they blindly agree with what the agent says, just to stay out of trouble.
Conversely, I had a client who was going to retire, and raise racehorses full time. The first 3 years, the losses exceeded $100K, and he was audited. I spent 4 hours in the IRS office, educating the agent on the validity of the taxpayer's claims, demonstrating there was a business purpose for his losses.
The IRS had no choice but to agree with us, and allowed every penny of those losses. However, I told my client it was time for him to show from income from his venture, else he'd be exposed to hobby loss rules.
Repeating facts makes you a racist to our modern woke SJW Leftists. Of course, dealing with problems requires a firm knowledge of the facts, at least in my world. It’s a real issue that makes solving the problems extremely difficult, if not impossible. No one likes being called a racist, so the problems fester. But that’s where we are.
Plus, I imagine that they find a lot fewer things they can collect on when auditing rich people who hired lawyers to do the job, while I imagine it is easy to find errors for the poor people who can’t hire any help and are struggling to figure out the paperwork.
I imagine most of the errors found are not “cheating”, but rather people who just had no clue what to do, and did it wrong.
Is this why Obama provided the IRS with full Auto M16’S?
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