IRS puts the amount of tax liabilities which will never be paid for 2006 at $385 BILLION

[Bill USA]

.. for 2001 the Net Tax Gap (the taxes owed that will never be paid) at $290 Billion.

This is interesting information at a time when much discussion is focused on Deficit reduction. If ten years at a Net Tax Gap of $385 Billion per year, if all the taxes owed our Government were collected, we would have, roughly speaking, an additional $4 trillion dollars of revenues.


http://www.irs.gov/uac/IRS-Releases-New-Tax-Gap-Estimates;-Compliance-Rates-Remain-Statistically-Unchanged-From-Previous-Study

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today released a new set of tax gap estimates for tax year 2006. The tax gap is defined as the amount of tax liability faced by taxpayers that is not paid on time.

The new tax gap estimate represents the first full update of the report in five years, and it shows the nation’s compliance rate is essentially unchanged from the last review covering tax year 2001.

The tax gap statistic is a helpful guide to the scale of tax compliance and to the persisting sources of low compliance, but it is not an adequate guide to year-to-year changes in IRS programs or to year-to-year returns on IRS service and enforcement initiatives.

The following table summarizes the new estimates being released today, as compared to the 2001 estimates, along with the total tax liabilities in each year.


The voluntary compliance rate — the percentage of total tax revenues paid on a timely basis — for tax year 2006 is estimated to be 83.1 percent. The voluntary compliance rate for 2006 is statistically unchanged from the most recent prior estimate of 83.7 percent calculated for tax year 2001.
(more)

summary of methods of estimating the Tax Gap: http://www.irs.gov/pub/newsroom/summary_of_methods_tax_gap_2006.pdf

more here: http://www.irs.gov/pub/newsroom/overview_tax_gap_2006.pdf

[railsback]

1. The Right's argument will be predictable:

'Its not enough to pay down the debt, so why bother… oh, and fuck you, Planned Parenthood.'

[bemildred]

2. It is no accident that the IRS does not spend much time auditing Corporations.

Even though you know that is where the money is.

If the Congress really wants to fix the deficit, all they have to do is increase funding for the IRS and tell them to go hunt corporations.