The richest Americans dodge much more in income taxes than the Internal Revenue Service previously assumed, according to research being published Monday by IRS and academic researchers.
The top 1 percent of U.S. households don't report about 21 percent of their income, and a big slice of that — 6 percentage points — is from sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies that aren't detected in spot IRS audits, The Wall Street Journal reports. The top 0.1 percent of households may hide nearly twice the amount of income projected by conventional IRS methodologies, the researchers found.
The main drivers of this tax avoidance by the super wealthy are hiding money offshore and the increasing use of pass-through businesses like investment funds, real estate enterprises, closely held family firms, and other partnerships, the researcher found. In such businesses, income passes through an owner's individual tax returns and is not taxed at the corporate level, the Journal explains.
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"There is more revenue than you might have thought at the very top," Daniel Reck of the London School of Economics, the paper's lead nongovernment author, tells the Journal. "What's needed is a broader strategy that involves increased scrutiny of pass-through businesses [and] investments in the comprehensive audits that the IRS does in its global high-wealth program." The research is being released by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The IRS has been squeezed by budget cuts for a decade, and audit rates and enforcement have dropped accordingly. "The share of all tax returns subject to an audit declined by 46 percent from 2010 to 2018," The New York Times said in an editorial, citing Congressional Budget Office research. "For millionaires, the decline in the audit rate was 61 percent. Today, the government employs fewer people to track down deadbeats than at any time since the 1950s."
Increased investment in the IRS and specialized agents are needed — and would more than pay for themselves, the Times says, but Congress should also take the advice of former IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti and create "a third-party verification system for business income," similar to the W-2 system for wages. The lack of such a parallel verification system means "the burden of paying for public services falls more heavily on wage earners than on business owners," the Times argues. "The proposal would not increase the amount anyone owes in taxes. It would, instead, increase the amount paid in taxes by those who are currently cheating."
