by Dale Walker
The IRS started off the 2022 tax season ringing the alarm bells, warning taxpayers that they do not have the resources to return filers’ tax returns in a timely manner and will likely be overwhelmed by the number of returns.
You might think that this means that you won’t have to pay your 2021 taxes. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you will. Unless, of course, you’re wealthy.
Report after report has shown that, for years, the wealthy have gotten away with murder when it comes to paying taxes in the US. The IRS estimates the current tax gap — the difference between the amount of taxes the IRS expects and what it actually gets — to be somewhere around $1 trillion. Reasons for this incomprehensible total are multifold, but the biggest involves the wealthy evading tax. I don’t suggest that all the wealthy seek to avoid their fair share, but wealthy Americans like me are able to pay armies of tax lawyers to utilize any and every tax loophole and exemption available to avoid paying as much tax as possible, and some certainly do.
Unfortunately, as it stands today, the IRS simply does not have enough resources to go after wealthy tax evaders and fix the tax gap. Thanks to COVID-related staffing issues and a decades-long right wing attack on this critical agency, the IRS is in a sorry state. There are simply too few service personnel to meet the current demand of this taxation season, with 1 representative for every 16,000 Americans. Budget cuts have left the agency unable to properly dole out pandemic aid to businesses thanks to massive paper backlogs, which is no surprise when you consider that the agency has roughly the same size workforce that it did in 1970, despite the population increase since then.
But no matter how underfunded the IRS is, know that lower and middle class Americans still have to pay their taxes or the federal government will bring down the hammer on them. Because, as it stands in this country today, skipping your tax bill is only a privilege reserved for the wealthy and corporations.
I know this firsthand as someone who benefits from the same rules that notorious tax dodgers like Jeff Bezos use. And though I’m nowhere near as wealthy as they are, I’ve seen just how rigged this system is in favor of individuals like us.
With their massive funding gaps, the IRS simply does not have the resources to go after wealthy tax dodgers who can spend obscene amounts of money on expensive tax lawyers if they were ever threatened with an audit. So rather than chasing the largest source of tax fraud, the agency has increased the amount of audits it performs against low-income taxpayers.
This is not only an unjust decision by the agency: It’s simply inefficient. Picking on the little guy does not levy anywhere near the amount that would come from a moderately wealthy individual. While it would be expensive to audit even just a handful of wealthy tax dodgers, the returns would make the effort worthwhile. Estimates show that by putting down just $70 billion over 10 years, the IRS can raise a whopping $1.2 trillion in new funds over that same time frame — far more than it would ever get from auditing working Americans.
When the wealthy avoid paying such extreme amounts of money, the burden of filling the funding gaps falls directly on the same working Americans who do pay their fair share. From our crumbling infrastructure to our many underfunded public schools, it’s everyday Americans that pay the price for the greed of some of the ultra-wealthy. With the sorry state of many of our public goods, we need that funding more than ever.
Regardless of what you think of taxes, we need them to pay for our civilization, as Wendell Holmes Jr. once famously said. The majority of Americans understand this and it’s why polling consistently shows strong support for reforming our tax system to make the wealthiest corporations and individuals pay their fair share. And while I do think that we need to raise taxes on some of the wealthiest in our country, we can get the same bonus by simply giving the IRS an appropriate budget to go after rich tax cheats. A well-funded IRS can raise revenue and slow the out-of-control levels of wealth inequality that we are currently experiencing as a country. And with this, we’re only talking about adhering to and enforcing existing law. What can be disputed about that?
