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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe IRS plans to end a major tax loophole for wealthy taxpayers that could raise more than $50 billion in revenue over the next decade, the U.S. Treasury Department says.
The guidance and ruling being announced Monday includes plans to essentially stop “partnership basis shifting”—a process by which a business or person can move assets among a series of related parties to avoid paying taxes.
Biden administration officials said after evaluating the practice that there are no economic grounds for these transactions, with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo calling it “really just a shell game.” The officials said the additional IRS funding provided through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had enabled increased oversight and greater awareness of the practice.
“These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe,” IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said.
Due to previous years of underfunding, the IRS had cut back on the auditing of wealthy individuals and the shifting of assets among partnerships and companies became common.
The IRS says filings for large pass-through businesses used for the type of tax avoidance in the guidance increased 70% from 174,100 in 2010 to 297,400 in 2019. However, audit rates for these businesses fell from 3.8% to 0.1% in the same time frame.
Treasury said in a statement announcing the new guidance that there is an estimated $160 billion gap between what the top 1% of earners likely owe in taxes and what they pay.
Monday’s announcement is part of the IRS’s ongoing effort to zero in on high-wealth tax cheats who manipulate the tax code or don’t pay their taxes at all.
Initiatives announced in the past year have included pursuing people and businesses that improperly deduct personal flights on corporate jets and collecting back taxes from delinquent millionaires.
The IRS plans to raise audit rates on companies with assets above $250 million to 22.6% in 2026, from an 8.8% rate in the tax year 2019. It also plans to increase audit rates by tenfold on large complex partnerships with assets over $10 million.
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How about spend less with more accountability and then they wouldn’t have to invent new ways of taxing all of the time.
Austerity has never worked once. This isn’t a new tax, it’s making wealthy tax cheats pay what they owe.
Your argument is we shouldn’t make the wealthy pay their fair share and force the middle class to shoulder the burden, but we should build less aircraft carriers which are a huge waste of money beyond the number we already?
I’d say we should do this and shrink the military budget
The rich already pay 70% of the taxes. So what is this fair share?
Douglas – you are stating a bullet point with misleading facts behind it…
And if the rich hold 95% of all wealth – they should be paying 95% of all taxes per your statement…. not 70%.
That means the middle class (what is left of it) holds 5% of the countries wealth and pays 25% of its taxes… so you are paying 7.2x as much in taxes per AGI than the top 5%
The top 1% of income earners in the US hold 30% of the wealth of the entire country and pay an effective tax rate of 25%. That’s a significantly lower rate than what I pay as someone who falls squarely in the middle! The fact that a small handful of people could personally fund the operations of the Federal government for several years and that they’ve lobbied harder and harder to shift the tax burden onto the poor and middle class is absurd. Crank up those tax rates on the rich.
This is way overdue, Joe…and it’s not the IRS’s responsibility to judge how tax money is spent.
This is merely enforcing the laws that are on the books.