Summary
Mass firings at the IRS under the Trump administration threaten ongoing audits of wealthy individuals and corporations, potentially leading to millions in lost tax revenue.
The cuts primarily impacted employees in the Large Business & International Division, many of whom had extensive tax expertise.
With fewer agents and specialists, complex cases may be prematurely closed, undermining enforcement against high-end tax evasion.
Critics warn this weakens IRS oversight and emboldens tax avoidance among the ultrawealthy.
Why wouldn’t they retaliate by specifically prioritizing the wealthy?
If they’re crunched on time wouldn’t they focus on the highest value accounts?
TLDR: They are prioritizing the wealthy. They simply can’t afford to audit them without staff and funds to do so. They only audit if doing so is profitable for the government.
They did. They have been targeting the wealthy for years. It has been all over the news.
Problem is, court cases are expensive, running audits are more expensive based on the scale of the assets involved.
The IRS always makes additional money back based on every dollar of funding given to them but Republicans always defund the IRS. Here is an article about it from the end of the last Trump Admin LINK HERE
Turns out they only have enough to audit the poor and middle class.
Actually, they have so few staff on hand that it isn’t economic to audit the poor. You can expect them to never audit you unlesd they think they can make 20-30k out of it.
Correction: to harass people that oppose the system with fraudulent tax audits.
Easy pickings. The average middle class folk pay up what ever the gov says they owe, when they receive a stern letter while the rich lawyer up at the drop of a hat. Also, if a neighbor gets in trouble, the whole neighborhood gets scared and obeys. If a few irate taxpayer pulled a Luigi, things might change.
They are going after the people who don’t have armies of lawyers to slow the process down…easy pickings
So much corruption under this convicted felon president.
Thank goodness! The eternally suffering oligarchs will finally get a break from all the riff raff harassment
Friendly reminder that Joe Biden increased resources to the IRS and they recouped billions from wealthy tax cheats.
But he was too old, so we went with an old rapist felon traitor instead.
Fucken sick of this blatant manipulation by the wealthy. The IRS is our fucken money maker.
Let’s rename it to “Accounts Receivable” and really run this country like a business.
I would say “why don’t they just focus on rich people and not audit the other 90% of Americans.” But we already know the answer to that one no matter who’s in charge.
Gee, that almost sounds like it was intentional.
The only thing that’s incorrect about this article is that they talk about millions in lost revenue, when the effect will certainly be in the billion if not trillion dollar range.
Not even subtle about it any more.
They weren’t subtle to begin with.
It doesn’t make sense to me because there are fewer ultra wealthy people in America than there are poor people.
so with staff getting cut in half, you’d think it would be better to focus on the smaller group.The rich have more assets and income sources and have staff who do a bunch of financial chicanery to try to hide their tax evasion. Auditing the rich requires significantly more work than the poor.
These decisions are not about doing what makes sense. The IRS is a revenue generator. Spending money on the IRS brings in significantly more money in unpaid taxes than it costs.
The goal is not to do what’s best for the government’s budget. Its really about ensuring that their criminal friends can continue to get away with it.
but the payback from auditing the rich and finding cheats is way more than the few cents per poor.
It’s high risk/high reward, vs low risk/low reward for lower income households. However I’m sure there are things like qoutas, etc. that push auditors to go after the easy wins.
Not to mention you loose some big cases against wealthy people cause they have a lot of money, and they come after your job or make the IRS look ineffective.
Smaller group with more to pay. It’s a no-brainer if you’re acting in good faith and not a complete moron. So obviously not what the current administration is going to do.
This is just the continued pushing of the tax burden onto the middle class. Which really got started good under Reagan. I think this is just the result of the uneducated GOP supporters winning this election. Now it is just a constant flood of them having no idea how government functions while ruining stuff for the rest of society,
And low info,.plus bigotry too.
But they’re winning! And fucking over “the libs” at the same time!
I can only assume it’s because rich people’s audits are highly complex
Auditing the less wealthy is already automated.
Retail Store CEO:
We will save money by firing all the cashiers!
That kind of seems like the opposite of efficiency
Almost like efficiency was never the point.
Makes it more efficient for the wealthy when finding ways to avoid paying tax.
Thank goodness. Those poor billionaires having to suffer with taxes and things like a pleb. Disrespectful. I bet no one has even publicly thanked them for being rich today.
They should have cut all IRS investigations except the wealthy.
For every dollar spent on IRS audits for middle America, they get about a dollar back in recovered revenue. For every dollar spent on auditing wealthy Americans, they get about twelve dollars back in recovered revenue. I don’t think these cuts are intended to help balance the budget.
Why would they do exactly the opposite of their goal?
I may be behind, have they installed a Republican shill in directorship in the IRS as well as defunding them? If not, then they should still have agency in fund allocation
Ah…balls.
The rest of us are mostly automated. Checking your return against a W2 and a couple of bank 1099s is easy.
Chasing down tax dodging through a web of pass through entities is not.
Fair point, but potential returns are massive, and if they were targeting likely evaders , they could compound the money spent on manual checks (a list of high ranking Republican members might be a good place to start)
Sue Trump and Elon for the illegal firing now before it is too late.
That’ll get you literally nowhere. Someone with deep pockets would be the only option to sue em, even then, they’ll just counter sue for defamation and drown you in legal fees
