U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is calling on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to step up enforcement against wealthy individuals who fail to file tax returns, citing a new report that said thousands of wealthy Americans are evading taxes.
Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said IRS data shows a disregard for federal tax laws by hundreds of wealthy families, yet few of the tax evaders been held accountable.
“Over the last decade, Congressional Republicans have led the push to cut IRS resources in order to let wealthy tax cheats off the hook—and according to this data they’ve succeeded,” Wyden wrote in a letter to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel. “Odds are, if you’re a wealthy tax cheat that doesn’t even bother to file a tax return, you’ll get away with it.”
According to IRS data, the top 500 high-income individuals who still have not filed returns for each year from 2017 to 2020 owed $923 million, said Wyden. Yet, they were unlikely to face serious consequences as only two of those 2,000 individuals were in active criminal investigation. Further, only 58 have been subjected to financial penalties such as liens or levies.
“This data makes clear that despite current political narratives peddled by my Republican colleagues, it remains exceedingly rare that wealthy individuals are subject to prosecution for willful failure to file violations, and thousands continue to evade responsibility for failure to file,” Wyden said. “I urge the IRS to initiate enforcement actions against every single millionaire non-filer as part of its ongoing effort to use Inflation Reduction Act funding to restore fairness in tax compliance.”
Wyden’s own investigation found that nearly 1,000 taxpayers who make more than $1 million a year failed to file tax returns over multiple recent years. This results in them potentially owing $34 billion in taxes.