Originally published at: IRS reminder: if you are a thief or illegal drug dealer, be sure to report those earnings | Boing Boing
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Another reminder: money laundered in previous tax years but with gains realized in the current tax year is taxed at the current tax year’s rate, but you must file an amended return for all years during which such money was being laundered.
Yes, we mean you, Trump family.
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mmm, how about no, irs.
The IRS can see the the spaceship billionaires in the USA before bothering with us lowly peasants.
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How about a bigger IRS that just does the paperwork for the hoi polloi instead of letting TurboTax lobby to keep tax prep profits alive and then the IRS can go after the wealthy tax cheats.
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I wonder if businesses are logging their wage theft in there. Hmmmm - I did demand that my 20 employees come in 15 min before work starts - and I took 30% of their tips. Ooo and I charged them if a customer walked out on a bill.
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The IRS is one of the few agencies that has direct, proven returns on government investment. For every extra dollar we spend on funding enforcement of tax laws (particularly tax laws impacting rich people) we get several dollars back in the form of revenue. So obviously the IRS is always at the top of the chopping block for conservatives who crow about “fiscal responsibility.”
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Problem is, those billionaires have high-priced accountants, lobbyists, and lawyers. Catching big fish like them takes time and a lot of work. It’s much easier to use a net and scoop up lots of little fish instead. 
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And, like all trawl fishing, if it scrapes the sea clean with innocent bycatch and kills them as well in the process of catching all the little fish they’re trying to get, then that’s just an unavoidable side effect.
Anyway, going out with lines and harpoons for the big fish isn’t just hard, it’s dangerous. Even lots of little fish can’t sink the trawler.
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So what you’re saying is, there’s more of us than them? The odds are with the average American, interesting possibilities await, one hopes sooner than later.
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Over on this side of the pond the tax agency holds responsibility for enforcing min wage. Unfortunately it’s a separate issue if it’s wage theft that doesn’t bring you below min wage.
I think it’s mostly because they go after businesses anyway. Income Taxes are deducted by the employer as we go along and they are responsible for sending it to the taxman. Similarly sales taxes, business taxes involve the taxman chasing the business directly.
IF y’all need to keep the “1 dollar of spend needs 1 dollar of cuts/taxes” rule that Congress has imposed on itself* then something like “$1m of spending for the IRS, that generates $15m of revenue, $15m for schools” should be a thing. I might be plagiarising Cory here.
*outside of the obvious exceptions
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So I can take off for crop failure after the gophers ruined my weed and poppy plants?
Asking for a friend.
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Seems appropriate.
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I read a story years ago about a guy the IRS came after for huge purchases he’d made years earlier, boat, house, etc. Where’d that money come from? He fessed up. Drugs. The statute of limitations was up for the drug offenses so they couldn’t prosecute that but they still wanted the taxes on the income. (I think this was in the old “News of the Weird” column pre-internet.)
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Saul: “Now what is the conclusion the tax man makes?”
Jesse: “I’m a drug dealer.”
Saul: “BRR! Wrong! Million times worse! You’re a tax cheat!”
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The ultra-perverse thing is that the IRS does do the paperwork(at least enough of it to have some chance of catching really unsophisticated attempts at underreporting and to send out refunds of approximately the right size to people who have had withheld more than they owed).
There are, certainly, people with much more complex situations(and not just higher on the food chain, I’m told that the bookkeeping for certain sorts of contracting and such can get brutal); but the IRS gets payroll information for anyone not being paid under the table; they get information from banks and brokerages and such; and then you have to re-type that same information because fuck Intuit.
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Unfortunately, wage theft occurs in pretty much the same areas that are relative blind spots for taxation: on the tax side there’s cash-under-the-table, which they can certainly make estimates about by inferring from other sources; but any sort of direct detection and enforcement is laborious and piecemeal, and absurdly-byzantine-creative-accounting; about which it is easy to have suspicions; but cannot be proven without arduous forensic accounting, lots of subpoenas; and probably years fighting with the highest powered lawyers available.
On the wage theft side you’ve got the cash tips that disappear and the unofficially mandatory duties prior to clocking in(as with cash under the table, fairly trivial to suspect and estimate; but laborious and case-by-case to do anything about); and you’ve got huge industry wide collusion to suppress wages(analogous to the esoteric accounting schemes, in that they do generate documents; but you’ve got to discover them and then ram the case through against massive legal firepower).
The one area where Tax Man data would probably be fairly useful would be examining things like salary discrepancies between men and women or various minority groups: if there is anything that the IRS absolutely has dialed in it’s reporting of wages for non-tipped employees who draw most of their income from their salary, or their salary plus some fairly tame stocks(reporting of retail-level investment accounts also being pretty comprehensive).
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