The IRS Admits It Doesn’t Audit the Rich Because It’s Too Hard

Only poor people have to pay back unpaid taxes.

According to Vox, Americans owe a cumulative $131 billion in unpaid taxes, enough to completely fund the Department of Education for two years. The bulk of that money is owed by the wealthiest people in the country, yet the IRS isn’t attempting to collect it from them. Instead, as IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig confirmed in a letter to Congress recently, the agency literally can’t afford to audit the rich, so it’s pursuing the poor instead.

Meanwhile if you are Black
Where in the U.S. Are You Most Likely to Be Audited by the IRS?

A mostly Black and poor county in Mississippi is the most heavily audited by the IRS. “The five counties with the highest audit rates are all predominantly African American ….

according to ProPublica, the IRS is in disarray on the inside, resulting in “a bureaucracy on life support.”

The cuts are depleting the staff members who help ensure that taxpayers pay what they owe. As of [2017], the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will.

ProPublica estimates that as a result, the U.S. is losing at least $18 billion dollars in revenue each year.