The IRS is going after rich tax cheats. What does that mean for the rest of us?
The Internal Revenue Service recently announced a campaign to dramatically increase audits of high-income Americans and large businesses, leveraging billions of dollars in new funding from Congress to recover lost tax revenue.
It’s easy enough to vilify the IRS, and few taxpayers would welcome an audit. The taxing agency stresses that its new push will focus on the truly affluent.
The IRS assures the public that audit rates will not increase for taxpayers earning less than $400,000 a year, a threshold that roughly corresponds to the top 2% of earners. That figure has attained symbolic value, given President Joe Biden’s repeated pledge not to raise taxes on people who earn less.
For middle-class Americans, the risk of an audit remains low
Tax experts say middle-income Americans probably face a lower risk of audit now than at almost any time in the recent past.
“I don’t think the average person has a single thing to worry about in terms of heightened enforcement,” said Robert Nassau, a law professor and director of the Low Income Taxpayer Clinic at Syracuse University. “In fact, if anything, people like us are…
