Well-to-do tax cheats, beware!
The Internal Revenue Service’s efforts to recover delinquent tax dollars from the wealthy has yielded more than $1.3 billion in unpaid taxes from people with more than $1 million in income and who owed more than $250,000 in recognized tax debt.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel revealed latest tally Friday during a visit to an IRS campus in Austin, Texas. That’s up from $1 billion in July.
Yellen told IRS employees the top 1 percent of wealthy Americans owed more than one-fifth of all unpaid taxes back in 2019, “leaving ordinary Americans to shoulder the burden.”
To address this discrepancy, “we’ve channeled IRS funding toward significant investments to combat tax evasion,” Yellen explained.
Nearly 80 percent of the 1,600 millionaires targeted for tax delinquency have since made payments, according to the IRS.
This year alone, the IRS collected $172 million from 21,000 wealthy taxpayers who hadn’t filed tax returns since 2017.
The department recently announced a crackdown on businesses wrongfully deducting personal flights on corporate jets.
Republicans have sought to cut the IRS’ funding.
They argue often increasing the agency’s resources — and thus, taxpayer scrutiny — will hurt middle-class taxpayers and small business owners.
Audit rates dropped significantly over the past decade — from 7.2% in 2011 to 0.7% in 2019, according to the IRS.
With Post wires.
