Adequately Fund IRS Enforcement (Or See Your Taxes Rise)

The chart above shows the number of IRS enforcement officer since 2007. Note that, thanks to Republican cuts to the IRS, the number of officers has declined significantly. That means that many citizens (those who can afford accountants and attorneys) are now evading paying the taxes they owe -- billions of dollars each year. Why should you care? If these tax evaders are not caught, you can expect taxes to rise for workers who pay their taxes. It's time to fully fund the IRS's tax enforcement efforts!

The following is part of an op-ed on this subject by Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post:

Here’s one issue that both the left and right should be able to agree on: Fund the police. Specifically, the tax police.

If you care about “law and order,” if you think unpatriotic hucksters are getting away with scamming Uncle Sam or, heck, if you don’t want your own taxes to increase, you should demand to beef up the Internal Revenue Service.

Yet for some reason the leading lights of the conservative movement are trying to block tax cops from enforcing the law.

While nearly all Americans say that paying taxes is a civic duty, some scofflaws nonetheless shirk. The difference between what Americans legally owe in taxes and what they actually pay is an estimated $554 billion per year. Part of the reason the tax gap is so enormous is that the agency tasked with collecting revenue and detecting cheats has been starved of resources.

During the past decade, the IRS budget has been slashed more than 20 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. Meanwhile, the agency has been loaded up with more complicated responsibilities, including implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act; combating identity theft; issuing pandemic stimulus payments; and, starting next week, lifting millions out of poverty through monthly child benefits.

Something had to give, and that something has largely been enforcement. The number of IRS personnel in key enforcement occupations has fallen by 40 percent.

Audit rates of the wealthy and large corporations have, unsurprisingly, also plummeted.

In 2012, for example, nearly every corporation with more than $20 billion in assets was audited. Last fiscal year, that share had dropped to just more than a third, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Such audits uncovered $10 billion in unreported taxes in 2012, vs. $4.1 billion last year. . . .

The pseudointellectual brain trust that has long powered the GOP is now lobbying againstadequately funding the IRS. Which proves that these anti-tax crusaders are (and have long been) a bunch of unserious grifters — less interested in “generating economic growth” than in lining their own pockets.

Among the backers of the lobbying effort are billionaire Robert Mercer and notorious charlatanStephen Moore, both of whom have previously run into trouble with the IRS for alleged tax dodges. They’re part of a consortium that once claimed to care about cutting tax rates to supercharge the economy but has apparently dropped the pretense. Making sure taxes legally owed are actually collected is not only fairer; it also helps keeps rates down. When tax compliance is higher, the government can set rates lower and still collect the same amount of revenue.

Inversely, when some people don’t pay their bills, the rest of us have to pay more to make up the shortfall. . . .

The people fighting to starve the IRS are the people who imagine the law doesn’t apply to them, only to the little people. If you want these thugs to pay what they owe, put more tax cops on the beat.