Current Events > IRS wont tax the wealthy because it doesnt have the funds to do so

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://twitter.com/propublica/status/1216910336793751558?s=20

Seems bad imo

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Not willing to spend money to get more money later

wat
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so maybe the government will fund them sufficiently?

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we've known this

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Working as designed. Very smart to cripple the revenue collector of the government while running up massive deficits.
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Government doesn't know how to government. Typical government

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So having enough money means you don't have to put back into society. And we're supposed to respect that.



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NeonOctopus posted...

Not willing to spend money to get more money later

wat

Auditing a rich person's portfolio is a much more taxing situation then just combing through Joe Fuckwad's RRSP contributions and income tax return.

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TheAwesomeMatt posted...

so maybe the government will fund them sufficiently?

NO THIS IS NOT AN OPTION

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conservatives like to deliberately underfund the IRS because they don't like it when their masters get audited

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Doom_Art posted...

conservatives like to deliberately underfund the IRS because they don't like it when their masters get audited

Last month, Rettig replied with a report, but it said the IRS has no plan and wont have one until Congress agrees to restore the funding it slashed from the agency over the past nine years something lawmakers have shown little inclination to do.

They really need to give the IRS a budget to do audits but nobody seems to care so poor people get flagged because they usually input forms they and the IRS receive so differences are easily flagged.

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This is such bullshit

Keep the avg man down

Trump doesnt care
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spudger posted...

This is such bullshit

Keep the avg man down

Trump doesnt care

It's not just a Trump problem it's a government problem if you have any intent on coming after the rich's money you will be destroyed, they will do everything short of actually murdering your ass to make sure those plans never come to fruition, it's why they're going after Bernie Sanders so fucking hard now if he by some way wins the nomination imagine all the patriotism of Trump vs the communist sanders style politics we'll be getting in the year

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Doom_Art posted...

conservatives like to deliberately underfund the IRS because they don't like it when their masters get audited

Your messiah Obama is the one who slashed their budget. Democrats like their rich overlords too.

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SK8T3R215 posted...

Last month, Rettig replied with a report, but it said the IRS has no plan and wont have one until Congress agrees to restore the funding it slashed from the agency over the past nine years something lawmakers have shown little inclination to do.

They really need to give the IRS a budget to do audits but nobody seems to care so poor people get flagged because they usually input forms they and the IRS receive so differences are easily flagged.

They do. Anytime the government goes out of its way to not take money away from it's people, it's because the governing want it for themselves

The government is most efficient at taking money and killing stuff

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SK8T3R215 posted...

They really need to give the IRS a budget to do audits

They really do

Need less Republicans in government too

Electing people who believe in funding government is a good start

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We need smaller government.

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Is it more difficult to audit the rich?

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ROBANN_88 posted...

Is it more difficult to audit the rich?

Yes.
If you audit a gozillionaire, he'll hire a super-mega-ninja-lawyer and just cause more expense for the prosecution.
Meanwhile, an intern auditor can shakedown hourly-wage or pensioner taxpayers with just a phone call. Hell, most the time it's not even a legitimate IRS representative successfully doing that.

NeonOctopus posted...

Not willing to spend money to get more money later

wat

Government is atrocious at MAKING money. Hell, I recall reading somewhere that the government of Ontario lost money selling legal weed. How the fuck do you manage that?
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ROBANN_88 posted...

Is it more difficult to audit the rich?

yes, their assets are more spread out and they usually have a trained CPA do their taxes for them, so they know all the tricks

your average Joe will file the paperwork himself, possibly make a mistake and make himself an easy target for the tax man who has nothing better to do than flag people for audits

this is all by design, since the biggest contributors to political campaigns are also the ones who would prefer not to have someone look into their books

ROBANN_88 posted...

Is it more difficult to audit the rich?

Yes.

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Crazyman93 posted...

Government is atrocious at MAKING money. Hell, I recall reading somewhere that the government of Ontario lost money selling legal weed. How the fuck do you manage that?

Bureaucratic bloat.

spudger posted...

This is such bullshit

Keep the avg man down

Trump doesnt care

Trump says he gets audited every year. Seems like they're picking on him if they aren't auditing the rest of the rich.

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ROBANN_88 posted...

Is it more difficult to audit the rich?

The rich are professional tax evaders. It's a lot more difficult to go through the books of someone who has paid for making the books really difficult to go through than just poor people who don't understand what rules they're breaking because it's really complicated.

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scar the 1 posted...

people who don't understand what rules they're breaking because it's really complicated.

This is an understatement. Entire forests have been leveled to print a physical tax code for CPAs before the internet. It's literally large enough that if you dropped it on a large dog or a horse you'd probably kill it.
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MI4 REAL posted...

We need smaller government

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TheAwesomeMatt posted...

so maybe the government will fund them sufficiently?

It's the IRS' own damn fault they don't have money. They abused their powers to selectively target people and the response from Congress was to cut their budget as punishment.

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supercrono posted...

Doom_Art posted...

conservatives like to deliberately underfund the IRS because they don't like it when their masters get audited

Your messiah Obama is the one who slashed their budget. Democrats like their rich overlords too.

I'm not necessarily disputing this, but which party was in control of congress when the funding was slashed?
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Tropicalwood posted...

TheAwesomeMatt posted...

so maybe the government will fund them sufficiently?

It's the IRS' own damn fault they don't have money. They abused their powers to selectively target people and the response from Congress was to cut their budget as punishment.

lol, imagine still believing that the IRS selectively targets conservative groups

all according to keikaku

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treewojima posted...

lol, imagine still believing that the IRS selectively targets conservative groups

That was a bipartisan issue moron

Hi mods

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Crazyman93 posted...

Government is atrocious at MAKING money. Hell, I recall reading somewhere that the government of Ontario lost money selling legal weed. How the fuck do you manage that?

I remember seeing an article years ago that one of the states literally didn't have enough money to fund its own lottery.

How the FUCK do you fuck up income from the lottery? It's literally free money!
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It's easy to get angry at this but consider the nature of the problem.

For most people, you can pretty much just look through their annual tax returns and income to piece together any fishy. Then you audit them, send them a letter and that's that. A case worker can do all that on a tuesday morning before lunch.

But investigating a wealthy person's extensive investment portfolio and then dealing with the inevitable lawyer fuckaround? That takes an entire department of people. For one guy.

I'm not saying it's right, but there are obvious resource issues there.

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pinky0926 posted...

It's easy to get angry at this but consider the nature of the problem.

For most people, you can pretty much just look through their annual tax returns and income to piece together any fishy. Then you audit them, send them a letter and that's that. A case worker can do all that on a tuesday morning before lunch.

But investigating a wealthy person's extensive investment portfolio and then dealing with the inevitable lawyer fuckaround? That takes an entire department of people. For one guy.

I'm not saying it's right, but there are obvious resource issues there.

Then they should allocate our tax dollars back into the IRS and not into useless war spending so they can dedicate rooms of people for one individual rich person

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pinky0926 posted...

I'm not saying it's right, but there are obvious resource issues there.

And when the wealthy people are in charge of allocating resources...

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Im still paying off an audit i got for lying on my tax return. Yet people lie all the time and get nothing. So sad.

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pinky0926 posted...

It's easy to get angry at this but consider the nature of the problem.

For most people, you can pretty much just look through their annual tax returns and income to piece together any fishy. Then you audit them, send them a letter and that's that. A case worker can do all that on a tuesday morning before lunch.

But investigating a wealthy person's extensive investment portfolio and then dealing with the inevitable lawyer fuckaround? That takes an entire department of people. For one guy.

I'm not saying it's right, but there are obvious resource issues there.

Imagine spending the time to type this shit out and defend it simply because you have an urge to play devils advocate in any and all situations

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FursonaNonGrata posted...

Imagine spending the time to type this shit out and defend it simply because you have an urge to play devils advocate in any and all situations

Imagine not being able to read what pinky actually wrote. Just imagine not being able to read, yet going to a forum that is primarly word based.

Can you imagine?

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i have said on this site several times that just increasing the IRS' budget 10x would be the best tool to raise revenue

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btw obama was responsible for a lot of bad things, but this isnt an issue you can pin on his administration. Literally his first year in office

https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits

In 2009, the IRS had formed a crack team of specialists to unravel the tax dodges of the ultrawealthy. In an age of widening inequality, with a concentration of wealth not seen since the Gilded Age, the rich were evading taxes through ever more sophisticated maneuvers. The IRS commissioner aimed to stanch the countrys losses with what he proclaimed would be a game-changing strategy. In short order, Charles Rettig, then a high-powered tax lawyer and today President Donald Trumps IRS commissioner, warned that the squad was conducting the audits from hell. If Trump were being audited, Rettig wrote during the presidential campaign, this is the elite team that would do it.


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His experience was telling. The IRS new approach to taking on the superwealthy has been stymied. The wealthys lobbyists immediately pushed to defang the new team. And soon after the group was formed, Republicans in Congress began slashing the agencys budget. As a result, the team didnt receive the resources it was promised. Thousands of IRS employees left from every corner of the agency, especially ones with expertise in complex audits, the kinds of specialists the agency hoped would staff the new elite unit. The agency had planned to assign 242 examiners to the group by 2012, according to a report by the IRS inspector general. But by 2014, it had only 96 auditors. By last year, the number had fallen to 58.

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Crazyman93 posted...

Government is atrocious at MAKING money. Hell, I recall reading somewhere that the government of Ontario lost money selling legal weed. How the fuck do you manage that?

Yes

The government of Ontario

Which since before legalization has been made up of the Conservative Party

Noticing a pattern here @Crazyman93 ?


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Yes it's more difficult to audit the wealthy but you get a lot more revenue from it. It's not the IRS's fault--they don't have the resources to go after the rich properly and so it is a waste of money for them.

It's the government's fault for taking away funding and making it easier for the rich to cheat the system. Mostly Republicans but the Democrats are no angels either.

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Balrog0 posted...

btw obama was responsible for a lot of bad things, but this isnt an issue you can pin on his administration. Literally his first year in office

https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits

The IRS new approach to taking on the superwealthy has been stymied. The wealthys lobbyists immediately pushed to defang the new team. And soon after the group was formed, Republicans in Congress began slashing the agencys budget. As a result, the team didnt receive the resources it was promised.

so Obama appointed a tax force (bad pun, i know), and the rich, corrupt politicians defang them as a response.
well, people will still blame Obama for this anyway with the "look at what you made me to do" defense that's getting popular lately

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Now you understand why the GOP has been trying to defund the IRS for decades.

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supercrono posted...

Your messiah Obama is the one who slashed their budget. Democrats like their rich overlords too.

people have already addressed whether or not this point is true -- it seems to be false, but I don't particularly care one way or the other.

my point here is to point out that Obama is also conservative. the democratic party as a whole is largely conservative.

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Yup, they just go after easier targets instead. They figure the common person doesn't have the resources to contest the IRS, and those cases aren't as complicated in general.
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I dream of the day when the ultrawealthy finally get taken to task and made to follow the same rules that everyone else has to.

Not gonna happen anytime soon, though.

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FursonaNonGrata posted...

Imagine spending the time to type this shit out and defend it simply because you have an urge to play devils advocate in any and all situations

That's...not it man. I agree that this is wrong.

I'm saying it's kinda juvenile to just say this unfair without being realistic about the mechanisms that cause it to happen.

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