GOP easy on big tax cheats

Most Americans think rules should be enforced. If someone passes you on the highway at a speed well above the limit, you probably resent it.

Same goes for someone who cuts in line ahead of you, or someone who shoots off fireworks in your neighborhood after midnight.

We rely on law enforcement personnel to maintain reasonable order in our communities. If we think there aren’t enough officers to get the job done, we’re generally willing to shell out more money to beef up the force. Empowering law enforcement is what “Back the Blue” is all about.

The same is true for the federal level. 

Reducing illegal immigration has strong support among voters in both political parties, according to public opinion polls. Most people advocate cracking down on international mobster activity, and internet crime like ransomware hacking is universally despised.

Tax evasion is another crime that most of us resent. It comes under the heading of “waste, fraud and abuse” that members of Congress for decades have railed against. You would think that if there were a way to fight back against tax evaders, federal lawmakers would fall all over themselves to support such a step.

And there is such a solution: hire more Internal Revenue Service tax investigators.

The payback in reduced tax evasion — in additional tax revenues legally owed that now go unpaid by wealthy corporations — would pay the salaries of the additional personnel many times over.

But it’s not that easy.

There was just such a provision in the initial bipartisan infrastructure bill now being crafted in Congress. Centrists of both parties appear close to presenting a measure that stands a good chance of passage in both houses.

President Biden has called for an additional $80 billion in funding for the IRS over the next decade to ferret out wealthy and corporate tax cheats. The estimate is that it would raise $700 billion over 10 years. Not a bad payback, right?

The bipartisan infrastructure bill’s provision to increase IRS efforts was much smaller — its payback was only $100 billion over 10 years. 

But Republicans in the bipartisan coalition balked at even that modest step, after they learned that Democrats might be planning to add a more comprehensive version, closer to Biden’s, to their own larger infrastructure bill after the bipartisan bill passes.

Apparently a number of wealthy backers of Republican lawmakers don’t want to give the IRS more clout to go after tax cheats. 

This is different from Biden’s proposal to roll back some of the Trump tax cuts that benefit the wealthy. This is simply an effort to enforce the tax laws already on the books.

It takes investigators lots of time to solve sophisticated and complicated tax evasion mazes. The IRS, which has seen its personnel chipped away by Congress over the years, is now physically unable to catch the scofflaws. So it disproportionately goes after lower-income people because they’re cheaper to audit.

A recent report in the Washington Post found that federal audits of corporations have decreased significantly in recent years because Congress has slashed the IRS budget.

“As a result the federal government now examines just half of all large company tax returns, despite businesses claiming increasing tax benefits over this period that they say could be overturned by authorities,” wrote the Post.

From some of the law-and-order folks, here’s the message: Enforce the laws (but not all of them).

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