IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel said that with a boost in federal funding and the help of artificial intelligence tools, the agency has new means of targeting wealthy people who have “cut corners” on their taxes.
“If you pay your taxes on time it should be particularly frustrating when you see that wealthy filers are not,” Werfel told reporters in a call previewing the announcement. He said 1,600 millionaires who owe at least $250,000 each in back taxes and 75 large business partnerships that have assets of roughly $10 billion on average are targeted for the new “compliance efforts.”
My issue with the taxman is that they have created and continue to allow those complications which only the rich can use, and therefore are elitist rules.
I wish the feds would/could go back to a basic tax structure based on wealth/income alone … where there’s nowhere for the rich to hide.
The thing is, much of the complexity is directly in response to the stunts jackasses have pulled over the decades, to prevent that from happening again.
Complexity aside, focusing on sheer logistics, to do a true full scale ‘drop your shorts and cough’ audit, the auditor would need to cross-reference receipts and bank statements to financial statements, then to the business returns, and follow it all to the individual owners.
That’s a colossal task, and it’s just too much work, not enough time to do it, and not enough qualified people to do it. Hopefully AI can assist in streamlining this process significantly in the future but who knows.