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internal revenue service
Trump and Musk Are Making It Harder for the IRS to Catch Wealthy Tax Cheats
Musk and Trump claim to be sage businessmen, but it would be hard to find a business owner in America that would dismantle their accounts receivable department when their wealthiest clients still owe them money.
Mar 29, 2025
The Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE have begun dismantling the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, beginning with 6,700 layoffs. Their stated plan is to cut half of the agency’s workforce.
Their biggest cuts appear to be in the Large Business and International division, which audits wealthy individuals and companies with more than $10 million in assets. These are essentially the workers that make sure billionaires and corporations pay their taxes.
Musk and President Donald Trump claim to be sage businessmen, but it would be hard to find a business owner in America that would dismantle their accounts receivable department when their wealthiest clients still owe them money.
The real beneficiaries of a weak IRS are billionaires and large global corporations.
So make no mistake: These cuts will cost taxpayers a lot more than they save.
Gutting the IRS will hurt the middle class by reducing the taxes billionaires and corporations pay for our public services. It passes the bill to working class taxpayers to cover veteran’s services, infrastructure, national parks, and defense.
When it comes to taxes, the wealthy aren’t like you or me. Most wage earners have our state and federal taxes withheld from our monthly paychecks. Ninety percent of taxpayers use the simple standard deduction filing and hope we get a refund.
But billionaires and multimillionaires are different. Their income comes mostly from investments and assets—which they can hide. They hire experts from the “wealth defense industry”—an armada of tax lawyers, accountants, and wealth managers—to minimize their taxes and maximize inheritances for their fortunate children.
They deploy anonymous shell companies, complex trusts, and bank accounts in tax havens like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and South Dakota to aid their clients in minimizing taxes—tools not available to ordinary taxpayers. According to the Tax Justice Network, over $21 trillion is now hidden in tax havens like these.
A 2021 exposé by ProPublica found that more than half of the 100 wealthiest U.S. billionaires use a complex trust system to avoid estate taxes, which at the current level only kicks in for people with wealth over $13.99 million.
This aggressive tax dodging by the superrich has resulted in an enormous “tax gap” between what they owe and what’s collected. For the last few years, this gap is estimated at $700 billion a year—almost the size of the Pentagon budget.
Working and middle class taxpayers will pick up the slack, or see their services cut. Most likely some of this gap will be added to the $36 trillion national debt, requiring us to pay on an installment plan.
In previous decades, the IRS had the expertise to keep up with the schemes that billionaires and transnational corporations use to dodge their taxes. But over the last two decades, their capacity to catch wealthy crooks and grifters has been decimated by cuts.
Things started to turn around again in 2021, when Congress voted to invest in enforcement. And already, the investment was starting to pay off. A year ago, the IRS announced they’d recovered $482 million from millionaires who hadn’t paid their debts.
Trump and Musk are now reversing these modest gains.
As the agency people love to hate, the IRS was an easy target for Trump’s anti-government attacks. But the real beneficiaries of a weak IRS are billionaires and large global corporations. With an understaffed IRS, their tax shell games can operate without scrutiny—something seven previous IRS commissioners from both parties recently spoke out against.
We may not agree about everything in the federal budget, but most people agree the wealthy should pay their fair share of whatever expenses we share. And it’s hard to catch the criminals if you remove all the cops on the beat.
The billionaires will be popping their champagne bottles. Even with the higher tariffs on European bubbly, they can afford the best.
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IRS, ICE Near Deal to Share Confidential Tax Data on Undocumented Immigrants
"No undocumented will trust the IRS ever again, and so they'll stop paying taxes," said one journalist. "And that was a pretty sweet deal for the U.S., since they did pay their fair share—billions of dollars each year."
Mar 24, 2025
Undocumented immigrants, who contribute nearly $100 billion in taxes each year and help fund benefits like Social Security and Medicare while remaining ineligible to receive them, are expected to soon lose the privacy afforded to them by a long-standing Internal Revenue Service policy as the IRS nears a deal with the Trump administration to help with immigration enforcement.
The IRS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are reportedly closing in on an agreement under which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons could request taxpayer data, including names and addresses, of undocumented immigrants who are being investigated for violating immigration laws in order to help officials locate them to carry out deportations.
The Washington Postreported Saturday that after weeks of negotiations, the Trump administration is close to finalizing the deal in an effort to speed up its mass deportation agenda, under which hundreds of immigrants have been rounded up and sent to be detained in El Salvador despite a court order prohibiting their deportation. ICE deported 11,000 immigrants last month, with people who were only accused of committing civil immigration offenses targeted despite Trump's claims that people who had committed violent crimes would be targeted for deportation.
The IRS deal represents "a shocking breach of trust," said former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Juliette Kayyem.
The former IRS commissioner, Doug O'Donnell, refused to hand over taxpayer data when the administration requested it last month, and resigned shortly after. Melanie Krause, who replaced O'Donnell as acting commissioner, "quickly signaled an interest in collaborating with Homeland Security," according to the Post, and has met several times with DHS and Treasury officials.
Two immigrant rights groups, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity Dupage, sued the IRS earlier this month to stop the agency from releasing taxpayer data to ICE and DHS, but last week the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia refused to issue a temporary restraining order "after the IRS represented that information had not yet been released," according to government watchdog Public Citizen, which represented the plaintiffs.
"Attempts by the Trump administration to gain access to the confidential taxpayer databases to engage in mass removal of workers would violate the tax law that protects the privacy of all taxpayers and undermine the protections promised to every taxpayer who files tax returns with the IRS," said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group. "Attempting to gain access to personal and confidential taxpayer information crosses a line that Congress put into place after [former President] Richard Nixon used tax records to go after his enemies during Watergate."
Joshi said the IRS must disclose the terms of its "unprecedented information sharing agreement."
"The administration's desire to speed up their deportation agenda does not justify jettisoning decades of taxpayer protections," he said. "If this deal is being negotiated in good faith, the government should not need to keep it secret."
Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, a Christian humanitarian group, said the group has long assured undocumented immigrant communities that people can file and pay their taxes without fear of being targeted by immigration authorities "because the IRS explicitly promised they won't talk to ICE."
Under the proposed deal between the IRS and ICE, said journalist Rafael Salido, no undocumented immigrant "will trust the IRS ever again, and so they'll stop paying taxes."
The administration's "attempt to hijack confidential taxpayer data for immigration enforcement in the middle of tax season is not only disturbing and unprecedented, it is reckless," said Kevin Herrera, legal director of Raise the Floor Alliance, which is also representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the IRS.
Undocumented immigrants who file their taxes with individual taxpayer identification numbers "rely on legal protection of their private information to feel safe paying into programs like Social Security, Medicare, and thousands of other essential government services that all Americans use," said Herrera. "Without the assurance of privacy, our entire tax system will be eroded. We will not be idle while our communities are under attack. We will continue to seek judicial intervention and use every tool at our disposal to stop this administration's campaign of prejudice and terror."
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When It Comes to Taxing the Rich, France’s National Assembly Is Leading the Way
Assembly lawmakers have just given a green light to the world’s first significant tax on billionaire wealth at a time when the most powerful nation on Earth—the United States—is moving in the exact opposite direction.
Mar 12, 2025
Nine of the world’s 10 wealthiest billionaires now call the United States home. The remaining one? He lives in France. And that one—Bernard Arnault, the 76-year-old who owns just about half the world’s largest maker of luxury goods—is now feeling some heat.
What has Arnault and his fellow French deep pockets beginning to sweat? Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly have just given a green light to the world’s first significant tax on billionaire wealth.
“The tax impunity of billionaires,” the measure’s prime sponsor, the Ecologist Party’s Eva Sas, exulted last month, “is over.”
The annual tax on grand fortune that the assembly’s lawmakers have passed, says the UC-Berkeley analyst Gabriel Zucman, represents “amazing progress” that has the potential to set a bold new global precedent.
Sas had good reason for exulting. In the French National Assembly debate over whether to start levying a 2% annual tax on wealth over 100 million euros—the equivalent of $108 million—the leader of the chamber’s hands-off-our-rich lawmakers introduced 26 amendments designed to undercut this landmark tax-the-rich initiative. All 26 of these amendments failed.
But France’s 4,000 or so deep pockets worth over 100 million euros—the nation’s richest 0.01%—don’t have to open up their checkbooks just quite yet. The French Senate’s right-wing-majority has no intention of backing the National Assembly’s new levy, and, even if the Senate did, France’s highest court would most likely dismiss the measure.
French president Emmanuel Macron, for his part, has spent most of the last decade cutting corporate tax rates and axing taxes on investment assets. And his budget minister has blasted last month’s National Assembly tax-the-rich move as both “confiscatory and ineffective.”
None of this opposition, believes the French economist who inspired the National Assembly’s new tax move, should give us cause to doubt that move’s significance. The annual tax on grand fortune that the assembly’s lawmakers have passed, says the UC-Berkeley analyst Gabriel Zucman, represents “amazing progress” that has the potential to set a bold new global precedent.
What makes the National Assembly’s tax legislation even more significant? That tax-the-rich vote has come at a time when the most powerful nation on Earth—the United States—is moving in the exact opposite direction. The new Trump administration, with the help of the world’s single richest individual, is now busily hollowing out the tax-the-rich capacity of the Internal Revenue Service.
President Donald Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, had actually made some serious moves to enhance that IRS capacity, hiring—before he left office—thousands of new tax staffers. But those new hires, notes a ProPublica analysis, have now started going through Elon Musk’s “DOGE” meat grinder.
Team Trump’s ultimate goal at the tax agency? To use layoffs, attrition, and buyouts to cut the overall IRS workforce “by as much as half,” The Associated Pressreports. A reduction in force that severe, charges former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, would render the IRS “dysfunctional.”
The prime target of the ongoing IRS cutbacks: the agency’s Large Business and International office, the IRS division that specializes in auditing America’s highest-income individuals and the companies they run.
On average, researchers have concluded over recent years, every dollar the IRS spends auditing America’s richest ends up returning as much as $12 in new tax revenue. The current gutting of the agency’s most skilled staffers, tax analysts have told ProPublica, “will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.”
Moves to “hamstring the IRS,” sums up former IRS Commissioner Koskinen, amount to “just a tax cut for tax cheats.”
Donald Trump, agrees the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s Amy Hanauer, “is waging economic war on the vast majority of Americans, pushing to further slash taxes on the wealthiest and corporations, while sapping the public services that keep our communities strong.”
Public services like Social Security. Elon Musk has lately taken to deriding America’s most beloved federal program as a “Ponzi scheme,” and the Social Security Administration’s new leadership team, suitably inspired, has just announced plans to trim some 7,000 jobs from an agency “already at a 50-year staffing low.”
A vicious economic squeeze on America’s seniors. A massive tax-time giveaway for America’s richest. How can we start reversing those sorts of inequality-inducing dynamics? The veteran retirement analyst Teresa Ghilarducci has one fascinating suggestion.
Any individual’s annual earnings over $176,100 will this year, Ghilarducci points out, face not a dime of Social Security tax. A CEO making millions of dollars a year will pay no more in Social Security tax than a civil engineer making a mere $176,100.
If lawmakers removed that arbitrary $176,100 Social Security tax cap and subjected more categories of income—like capital gains—to Social Security tax, Ghilarducci reflects, we could ensure Social Security’s viability for decades to come and even make giant strides to totally ending poverty among all Social Security recipients.
And if we had just merely eliminated the Social Security tax cap on annual earnings in 2023, the most recent stats show, America’s 229 top earners would have paid more into Social Security that year than the 77% of American workers who took home under $57,000.
We could also apply Ghilarducci’s zesty tax-the-rich spirit to the broader global economy, as the inspiration behind France’s recent tax-the-rich moves, the economist Gabriel Zucman, has just observed in a piece that cleverly suggests “tariffs for oligarchs.’
The fortunes of our super rich, Zucman reminds us, “depend on access to global markets,” a reality that could leave these rich vulnerable at tax time. Nations subject to Trump’s new tariffs, he goes on to explain, could retaliate by taking an imaginative approach to taxing Corporate America’s super rich.
“In other words,” Zucman notes, “if Tesla wants to sell cars in Canada and Mexico, Elon Musk—Tesla’s primary shareholder—should be required to pay taxes in those jurisdictions.”
Taking that approach “could trigger a virtuous cycle.” The super rich would soon find relocating either their firms or their fortunes to low-tax jurisdictions a pointless endeavor. Any savings they might reap from such moves would get offset by the higher taxes they would owe in nations with major markets.
The current economic “race to the bottom,” Zucman quips, could essentially become “a race to the top” that “neutralizes tax competition, fights inequality, and protects our planet.”
Lawmakers in France have just shown they’re willing to start racing in that top-oriented direction. May their inspiration spread.
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