How I learned to stop worrying and love audits.

…Every year the IRS collects data on “the tax gap.” The tax gap is the difference between the taxes the agency knows it’s owed and the taxes the agency has actually been paid. In fiscal year 2008, the tax gap was $345 billion. That’s about 14 percent of the total taxes collected that year. And you know who makes up that shortfall: those of us who didn’t dodge our taxes.
As long as we’re going to have a tax system, we may as well make sure we’re all paying our share. But the GOP has conducted a long campaign to defang the IRS’s ability to do that. In the late ’90s, the Republican-controlled Senate Finance Committee held a series of dramatic hearings in which individuals sat behind screens and haltingly, tearfully, told stories of IRS persecution. Some of the stories featured genuine misdeeds. Others fell apart upon later examination (Robert McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, remembers one in particular where it turned out the witness was living off his employee’s payroll taxes).
But the…

Originally posted here:
The Tax Man Should Cometh

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