subject: Irs Vows To Make The Richest Americans Pay Their Dues [print this page] If you are obscenely rich, hold on to your hat: the Internal Revenue Service is out to get you. That is, if you've been scamming Uncle Sam. Last tax season it was made apparent that the IRS was leaner, meaner, and that it was on the lookout for tax evaders. This past fall, the IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman announced something called a "Global High Wealth Exam Group." The main task of this group is to make sure that the richest people in America are paying what they owe in taxes.
If you have a nice house in a nice neighborhood, you need not worry. When they say "global wealth" they MEAN global wealth. Like, so rich that you wouldn't even be reading this yourself, you would be paying a servant to read it for you. Americans with incomes in the tens of millions of dollars. According to the most current IRS data available, in the year of 2004 there were around 47,000 individual taxpayers with a net worth of $20,000,000 or more.
Last year the press flooded us with stories about the richest people in the country hiding assets in offshore accounts to protect their massive stacks of cash from being proportionately, and legally, taxed. In fact, by last November, around 15,000 individuals had "voluntarily" reported their illegal activity to the Internal Revenue Service. This just goes to show you that if you make enough money, you can buy the prerogative to avoid going to jail for breaking the law by being forced to volunteer financial information.
The disturbing, selfish behavior of some of the richest individuals in the nation is not the only reason for this new program. When a person reaches a certain category of wealth, things get more complicated with trust arrangements, private equity and hedge funds, private foundations, and multi-tiered partnerships. Also, the world has gotten smaller, and many of these entities are foreign based which complicates things for the IRS further. It makes sense that it would take a team of experts to tease all of these issues out.
Hence, the "wealth squads" came out in part this tax season, manned with entire teams of IRS agents, partnership experts and international examiners. Specialists in the areas of retirement plans, insurance and annuity arrangements, exempt organizations, and financial instruments will be introduced to go through the Forms 1040 AND any and all related returns. The Internal Revenue Service informs us that a criminal investigation agent might potentially be asked to join the task force.
So what is a poor, defenseless multi-millionaire to do? Well, if they have been forthcoming in the past and paid the legal amount of cash that they owed to the country, they have no need to worry. For the rest, it may have seemed like a good idea to walk on the wild side of audits a few years ago, but now it doesn't seem like such a smart decision.
by: Mallory Megan
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