Rich Americans Are Stiffing the Taxman to the Tune of $66 Billion
by Michael Mechanic
September 28, 2023
Introduction:
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... taxes/(Mother Jones) America’s rich deadbeats just won’t stop deadbeating.
On Thursday, Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed that his committee had IRS data for tax years 2017-2020 showing that more than 1.4 million wealthy Americans had neglected to file a federal return. All told, these shirkers potentially owe the government as much as $66 billion.
More than 10,000 of them, Wyden wrote in a letter to the IRS commissioner, were repeat offenders. “Perhaps most alarming,” he noted, “was the extraordinary amount of unpaid taxes owed by a small subset of ultra-wealthy non-filers.” They included 8,729 people who potentially owed more than $500,000 each—nearly 1,000 had incomes in excess of $1 million a year. The top 500 non-filers each year—2,000 all told—owed a combined $923 million, Wyden added, yet only two were under active criminal investigation and only 58 had been subjected to liens and levies.
The taxman, clearly, has a long way yet to go.
“I think Americans are rightfully concerned when very wealthy families use loopholes and accounting strategies to avoid paying their fair share,” Wyden told me via his staff. “The people in this letter didn’t even bother with any of that.”
Indeed, America’s oligarchs and their hired guns have become increasingly skilled at tax avoidance in recent decades, and have succeeded in shaping the tax code to their preferences. The deeply unpopular tax cuts Republican leaders shoehorned through Congress in 2017 were the result of an unprecedented lobbying frenzy by corporations and wealthy interests, and it paid off. The nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness released a new report on Wednesday, based on Forbes data, noting that the wealth of US billionaires has swelled by 77 percent—$2.2 trillion—since the “Trump” tax cuts took effect.
