The ole saying… Oh Ben Franklin how you have aged so well
I know they’ve said they don’t have the capacity to take on the really big tax cheats (ie the same people that pay lobbyists and gift politicians with trips and gifts), but recovering one or two of their dodged taxes alone would probably cover every gig worker who’s ever underpaid taxes.
Of course, that would only make sense if you thought the IRS’ primary function was to fairly enforce taxation and mutual support of our shared govt—whereas the older I get, the more it seems to me that it serves as a social disciplining function and a lever to adjust social mobility. If your have enough money, you never have to worry about them.
This is why Biden gave them a big funding boost, to staff up so they could go after those people.
Well, maybe so, but so far they’re going after… gig workers
That’s certainly a start but only 1.7 billion of that is listed as explicitly “high-income” unpaid debt. Even if you were to assume the 4.7 billion was entirely from high income, which I doubt, it’s still dwarfed by estimates of the missing taxes from the 1%. Per this fast co article an estimate of 168 billion per year is evaded by the top 1%. That’s 28% of the total evaded tax revenue estimate of 600billion. I’d speculate that if you included grey area practices for sheltering and hiding money, that liability would grow substantially.
I fully understand the IRS is understaffed and has been choked for funding, my general point is that this is deliberate, and meant to force them to focus on recoverable things like gig workers as opposed to the very wealthy who can hold them off with lawyers and clever accountants. If it were possible for them to go after these people, that would be the most rational use of their time—when I need to free up space on a hard drive or email acct, I target the largest files and attachments first.
Exactly. The IRS can only work within the law, and if the law makes it easy for the wealthy to evade taxes. That needs to be fixed in Congress. So good luck to us all, I guess!
It’s a start, but it needs to go much, much further.
War machine go brrr we got Palestinian babies to kill. TurboTqx gotta get their cut too.
Why are normal people trying to scrape out a living being punished and not the companies that are exploiting labor laws? Require Uber, DoorFash, etc. To hire the workers as employees with a proper W-2
Theres no punishment, if you’re paying your taxes. Think of this as requiring the same reporting from companies as they already do for w-2.
Nice pfp
Gig workers are getting so damn rich! Better cut our profit!
It’s been known by employers for a while. I worked for an event catering gig for a summer or two and talking to the bosses they were well aware that the IRS was going from one gig in the state to another. For instance the year before my boss’s profession got hit, all of the places that hired golf caddies were audited all at once.
