I don’t think it would work for the IRS to just task their jackbooted agents to focus on the “big fish”.
I have heard it said, and I believe it, that going after rich people who may have tried to avoid taxes is a a task with diminishing returns.
People with a lot of money can hire lawyers to fight back, so I suspect you get diminishing returns the higher you go because you have to engage courts and resources on the government side, and they do have limits of a sort. Heck, I’ll wager even the IRS has to take into account allocating monies in their budgets to pay for agents who have to appear in court, prepare cases, etc.
People with little money may not even pay any taxes. So you can’t go after them.
I presume there is a “sweet spot” for those bastards, and that “sweet spot is largely in the middle class. Somewhere between those who don’t pay taxes at all, and those who pay, but can and will fight back.
They can go after people who may have had enough money to try to pay less and done so erroneously or illegally, but don’t have enough means to hire a lawyer.
In any case, those middle class taxpayers are probably more likely to have broken a law inadvertently, given the byzantine nature of tax law.
Wealthy people can hire talented, knowledgable accountants to do their taxes, people who know the law, know the legal loopholes, and can exploit those loopholes with confidence.
The IRS probably knows all this very well, and they hired these 87,000 new agents to come after the middle class.
To come after us.
Most filers receive all their income from sources required to file how much they paid to the filers. The forms are all matched electronically. “Ah, you missed 15 dollars in interest” does not require some gun carrying swat team to descend on the filer. They need 87000 more agents like a moose needs a hat rack.