The IRS intends to pursue 125,000 high-income taxpayers who failed to submit tax returns dating back to 2017 – the agency estimates that these cases contain hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes. Beginning this week, the IRS will begin delivering noncompliance letters to over 25,000 persons who earn more than $1 million per year and 100,000 people with earnings ranging from $400,000 to $1 million who did not pay their taxes between 2017 and 2021.
The IRS has recently unveiled several new programs geared against high-income individuals
The campaign announced Thursday is part of the agency’s ongoing effort to pursue high wealth tax cheats — mandated in part by funding provided through the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act passed into law in 2022 and a directive from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to IRS leadership not to increase audit rates on people making less than $400,000 a year annually. “When people don’t file a tax return they’re required to, it’s not fair to those hardworking taxpayers who responsibly do their civic duty under the laws of our nation,” IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel told reporters Thursday morning.
“And when people don’t file their taxes, they need to know there’s a consequence.” The IRS has recently unveiled several new programs geared against high-income individuals who abuse the tax system or refuse to pay their commitments. For example, IRS leadership announced this week that the agency will conduct dozens of audits on corporations’ private jets and how they are used personally by executives and written off as a tax credit. Earlier this year, the agency said that it had collected around half a billion dollars in back taxes from delinquent millionaires. Werfel stated that the agency’s non-filer initiatives had only operated intermittently since 2016 owing to a lack of cash and staffing. However, the federal tax collector obtained resources from the IRA, “the IRS now can do this core tax administration work,” he said. “This isn’t a small group of people we’re talking about.”