IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel has a message for high-wealth tax cheats who are wrongly deducting private jet travel and otherwise shorting the government on their taxes: Pay your fair share so “others aren’t shouldering the burden of funding our government.”
He also has a thought for ordinary taxpayers putting off the inevitable with less than a month left in tax-filing season: “Get it done.” (And double-check your work.)
Werfel, who will hit the one-year mark at the helm of the IRS in April, said in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press that the agency will expand its pursuit of high-wealth tax dodgers with new initiatives in the coming months and is using tools like artificial intelligence to ferret out abuses and taking the fight to sophisticated scammers.
That doesn’t mean the IRS has undergone a complete image makeover. There’s still plenty of criticism to go around, including from Republican lawmakers who accuse the agency of heavy-handed overreach.
But what if you creatively identify your income? And then get a bonus of a bunch of stocks, which you then leverage with a bank loan?.. oh right, that’s how a lot of them do it already.
That would be the lying part.
Eventually those shares would be sold, or inherited. That income would be taxed at whatever the algorithm dictates.
So, we’re back to playing the “algorithm” with what defines income, and what defines inherence, sale, etc of shares.
Sounds like essentially what we’ve got, just with the handwaving of “algorithm” instead.
It eliminates the picking and choosing of tax brackets. What you’re talking about is making definitions. There is no way to mathematically fix that.