The wealthiest 1 percent of people in the U.S. avoid paying a huge amount of the taxes they would normally owe every year, according to a new report from the Treasury Department.
The report found that the top 1 percent avoid paying over $160 billion in taxes every year, or about 28 percent of all taxes dodged yearly. The Treasury, citing a study of data from 2019 that calculates $163 billion in lost tax revenue, said “Ongoing work by IRS researchers and outside academics suggest[s] the concentration of the tax gap is even more skewed toward the top of the income distribution.”
While the agency notes that it’s difficult to estimate the tax loss from the highest tax brackets, the data shows that the bulk of the $163 billion figure stems from the wealthiest 0.5 percent of Americans who, according to the Treasury Department, dodge $120 billion in taxes annually.
Overall, the amount of taxes that don’t get paid every year by all taxpayers is equal to the entirety of the amount in income taxes paid by the bottom 90 percent of earners, the agency found. More importantly, the top 10 percent of earners are responsible for nearly 53 percent of the gap in taxes owed but not paid yearly.
“A well-functioning tax system requires that everyone pays the taxes they owe,” wrote Natasha Sarin, the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy. “The tax gap can be a major source of inequity. Today’s tax code contains two sets of rules: one for regular wage and salary workers who report virtually all the income they earn; and another for wealthy taxpayers, who are often able to avoid a large share of the taxes they owe.”
The report comes as Democrats and the White House have mounted a push to increase tax compliance with extra funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has previously said that the U.S. has missed out on over $7 trillion in uncollected taxes over a decade.
If the U.S. were able to capture the $163 billion in unpaid taxes from the top 1 percent every year for the next 10 years, even without hiking taxes for the wealthy, it could pay for nearly half of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
The Biden administration has spent the last months emphasizing ways to close the “tax gap,” or the proportion of income taxes paid by lower- and middle-income earners versus that paid by the wealthy and corporations. In the spring, Joe Biden unveiled a plan to essentially double the IRS’s enforcement arm in order to capture income taxes skipped by corporations and the wealthy. The plan, according to the May announcement, would give the agency $80 billion in funding over a decade and raise at least $780 billion over the next decade.
“The United States collects less tax revenue as a percentage of GDP than at most points in recent history, in part because owed but uncollected taxes are so significant,” wrote Sarin. “These unpaid taxes mean policymakers must choose between rising deficits, lower spending on important priorities, or further tax increase to compensate for lost revenue—which will only be borne by compliant taxpayers.”
Sarin also pointed out that the IRS simply lacks the resources to chase after all of the lost taxes. And, without the ability to sniff out the complicated tax-cheating methods used by the wealthy, the IRS’s audit rates for the wealthy have seriously declined over the years, whereas the audit rate for low-income recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit has not been greatly affected.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has also previously suggested an IRS crackdown on wealthy tax cheats — one that goes further than the Biden plan. Her plan would give the agency $31.5 billion yearly, more than twice its budget for 2021. This plan could raise $1.75 trillion over the next decade, Warren has said.
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The top 1% of Americans may be dodging as much as $163 billion in annual taxes, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. This estimate widens the so-called tax gap — the shortfall between how much is owed and collected — to $600 billion every year, Tuesday's report outlines.
High-Income Taxpayers Paid the Majority of Federal Income Taxes. In 2021, the bottom half of taxpayers earned 10.4 percent of total AGI and paid 2.3 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 1 percent earned 26.3 percent of total AGI and paid 45.8 percent of all federal income taxes.
The head of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has recently shed light on a staggering financial oversight, revealing that the nation's wealthiest individuals are bypassing over $150 billion in taxes each year.
An American entrepreneur, Walter Anderson made his millions after the breakup of AT&T in 1984. He was convicted of the largest tax evasion case in U.S. history for evading more than $200 million in taxes. It was reported that in 1998, he paid $495 in taxes on $67,939 of income.
While giant companies enjoyed record profits in recent years, many still pay lower tax rates than most working families. That's in part because many take advantage of generous tax breaks and stash profits in tax havens around the world.
The ideal is to owe zilch. If that sounds impossible to achieve, just look at the leaked tax returns of the wealthiest Americans that nonprofit news site ProPublica analyzed in 2021: Over several years, billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Bloomberg, among others, paid no federal income taxes at all.
The top 10 percent of earners bore responsibility for 76 percent of all income taxes paid, and the top 25 percent paid 89 percent of all income taxes. Altogether, the top 50 percent of filers earned 90 percent of all income and were responsible for 98 percent of all income taxes paid in 2021.
The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $723 billion in income taxes while the bottom 90 percent paid $450 billion. The share of income taxes paid by the top 1 percent increased from 33.2 percent in 2001 to 42.3 percent in 2020.
Ivory Coast. The country with beach resorts, rainforests, and a French-colonial legacy levies a massive 60% personal income tax – the highest in the world.
For 2021, the IRS projects a gross tax gap of $688 billion and a net amount of $625 billion. Individual income taxes made up the largest share of unpaid taxes, followed by employment and corporate income taxes.
According to Kiplinger, globally there are about 59 million millionaires. That number might actually be a bit lower if you factor in “inflation millionaires” – people who no longer would qualify once inflation was factored in.
In fiscal year 2022, IRS Criminal Investigation initiated over 2,550 criminal investigations and obtained a 90.6% conviction rate of those cases accepted for prosecution.
Musk has a history of using the US tax code to pay little or no personal federal income taxes. A report from ProPublica shows that for 2018 Musk and many other Americans near the top of the world's richest people paid no income tax.
The majority were White (49.0%) followed by Black (30.3%), Hispanic (12.7%),and Other Races (8.1%). The average age of these offenders at sentencing was 50 years. The majority of tax fraud offenders were United States citizens (94.0%).
The nation's millionaires and billionaires are evading more than $150 billion a year in taxes, adding to growing government deficits and creating a “lack of fairness” in the tax system, according to the head of the Internal Revenue Service.
The top 1 percent will pay an average rate of 31.5 percent this year, compared with 10–12 percent in the middle and about 0 percent at the bottom. The rates near the bottom can be negative because of refundable tax credits.
California will lose an estimated $69.2 billion in state General Fund revenues in 2021-22 to personal and corporate income tax breaks — or “tax expenditures.” 1.
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