IRS audits poorest families at five times the rate for everyone else

No tin in my hat.

https://news.yahoo.com/irs-requires-special-agents-carry-130...

This is certainly the hottest possible hot take.

> Have inheritance trigger a taxable event. This includes, by extension, allowing heirs to inherit stocks and property on a stepped up basis for CGT purposes;

This works for billionaires but harms regular people. If you applied capital gains tax to grandpa's modest gift to his grandchildren the grand children may very well end up with nearly nothing. In many states property taxes are reassessed upon property transfer in a will, so if your grandparents/parents had a really good property tax rate, you may end up paying so much tax that you can't afford to keep the house.

There are already enough ways to rob the middle class. No thank you.

> Tax stocks on market value every year just like we do with property.

This isn't done because the universe of ways you can move, adjust, hedge, and sell stock is too broad. Again, this inadvertently damages the middle class who by-and-large are passive investors. I already pay enough tax, thank you.

> Excessive audits of poor people with a deliberately complex system is punitive by design. Spending time and effort (and money) auditing the taxes of poor people is ridiculous.

If you look at the problem from the perspective of a relatively understaffed organization it is far easier to automate the common errors less well off people make. Having been on the receiving end of this majority of the audits are a simple letter saying "you screwed up, you actually owe this much" and nothing more. Auditing the ultra-wealthy takes an actual dedicated team to do because the ways that these people illegally hide money are complex and ever-changing. This is why nothing we have done to repatriate USD, or "tax the billionaires" has worked since the dawn of the country.

It honestly sounds like your statement here is actually a thin veil over just letting anyone making under $N exploit the system at (once again) the cost of the middle class. Moreover, the title of OP is deliberately inflammatory. The audit rate below 100k is extremely low. The delta can be explained by the difficulty involved.

> Enforcement of a program like the EITC is a cost you do not have to pay. It is a waste of resources.

It is possible to commit extremely complex fraud with the EITC. I pay so much tax as a software engineer I'd like to see other people get pounded by the IRS too regardless of how much more or less than me they make.

> In fact, auditing anyone who makes less than $50,000 a year should be illegal. Maybe even $100,000.

lol.

And the bill that just passed adds 87000 new IRS agents. Additionally every single democrat voted against an amendment that would have prevented new agents from auditing individuals and small businesses with less than $400,000 of taxable income.

I mean, I'm a Marxist and I think lots of stuff is political, but even I can't figure out what that poster was trying to say.

I really wish they would quit calling the simple these-numbers-don't-match correspondence things "audits". It gives a very different picture to what's happening.

Yeah, if you're poor you're a lot more likely to be doing your taxes by hand and thus you have much more room to make a copied-the-number-wrong mistake. Hence a high rate of "audits" in lower incomes. There's also more room to misunderstand something and enter wrong numbers.

Separate them out based on whether it's just a letter kicked out by the computer and the taxpayer easily remedies whatever the computer was complaining about vs cases where the IRS is actually hunting for wrongdoing (say, unreported income from a cash-heavy small business.)

I do agree, however, they need to target those with more. It's a lot harder so they tend not to and that has become much more severe because the Republicans have been deliberately starving them, they don't have the resources to do much of any actual auditing, it's almost all just these-numbers-don't-agree letters from the computer.