Summary
The IRS announced it has recovered $4.7 billion in back taxes and criminal proceeds since receiving $80 billion in funding through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
This includes $1.3 billion from wealthy tax dodgers and $2.9 billion from criminal investigations.
Despite these gains, the IRS faces funding cuts: $1.4 billion was rescinded earlier, and $20 billion is frozen or redirected under recent budget deals.
Republicans, under a new majority, aim to further reduce IRS funding and renew Trump-era tax cuts. Trump has nominated Billy Long as the next IRS commissioner, drawing criticism from Democrats.
I’m definitely missing the whole story, because getting $4.2B back from $80B in funding is terrible ROI. Where is all of this money going?
They had to staff up which has a delay on impact. The money was supposed to last awhile and historically every dollar given to the IRS results in more money back. The more complex cases take longer to get results from as well. Those rich folks have very complex set ups to avoid paying taxes.
And as mentioned, they also built that tax portal which will likely expand and will save tax payers millions of dollars instead of going to turbotax etc.
They received $80B but haven’t spent it yet. Looks like they’ve spent $7B so far , and it looks like the Republicans rescinded $20B of it already.
Still not a great ROI but they could be spending the money on building infrastructure to recover more. I’m guessing they require some pretty good software to catch the cheats and that costs a lot to create but less to maintain. That plus general growing pains might mean they’ll take a bit to ramp up, but we might start seeing more ROI gains in the following couple years.
Also they’re using some of it to improve operations like creating the new free tax portal so you don’t have to pay through turbotax, h&r etc. So that’d be nice, maybe not worth $1B, but nice
Hopefully the new tax portal is great. That alone would be worth 1B. Just sending everyone a disputable bill or check would be easier and cheaper of course but we can’t have that.