The IRS is going after high-income earners who skipped out on filing federal income tax returns in more than 125,000 instances since 2017, the agency said Thursday.
They’re believed to owe, based on a conservative estimate, hundreds of millions of dollars, the IRS said. The number could be much higher – but the IRS said it can’t be sure of an exact amount since the agency doesn’t know what potential credits and deductions these people may have.
“At this time of year when millions of hard-working people are doing the right thing paying their taxes, we cannot tolerate those with higher incomes failing to do a basic civic duty of filing a tax return,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a press release. “The IRS is taking this step to address this most basic form of non-compliance, which includes many who are engaged in tax evasion.”
I remember being around my friends that were all contractors paying themselves the “minimum” to avoid tax and then expensing things to their company. Earning only a fraction of what they did and they’d always joke that I should pick up the bill.
During the Great Recession I spent a few months at a temp IT job for an environmental services contractor, helping their solo sysadmin keep up with a huge hiring boom as they got hired to work the Deepwater Horizon cleanup. Over the course of my employment, I gradually worked out that my boss wasn’t supposed to be a one man shop, but the other guy was the CEO’s adult son… and he literally never showed up in the office except to pick up his paycheck, like the scene from Arrested Development.
As it turns out, the paycheck wasn’t the only thing Failson Junior was getting from the company. His house? It was a “branch office,” so the company paid the mortgage and all the utilities. His car was a company car, for all the business-critical IT emergencies he never responded to, and his phone provided by the company so that he could ignore support calls. With all those company perks, Junior spent all his time fishing and coaching Little League, while his supposed boss slowly went insane as he struggled to support the IT needs of 500 people instead of the usual 50.
As you might guess, Junior’s nepobaby lifestyle wasn’t the only fucky thing about that company. The corporate accountant complained the the CEO and her husband treated the company’s accounts like their private piggy bank, putting everything from iPads to RVs in the company’s name. They’d very nearly pushed the company to insolvency before using some very suspect MBE/WBE creds to snag a piece of the Deepwater Horizon cleanup operation. When I joined up, they pitched themselves as a tight-knit, family-owned business. After the wellhead got capped, the cleanup wound down, and I was laid off, I vowed to never again work for another family-owned business.