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tax dodging
Who’s Leading Trump’s IRS as Tax Dodgers Run Wild? Apparently No One
Investigations and enforcement actions against rich tax cheats have plummeted amid a leadership vacuum at the Internal Revenue Service.
Mar 10, 2026
A group of Senate Democrats on Monday accused the Trump administration of "evading or ignoring" federal law by leaving the decimated Internal Revenue Service without a permanent leader during tax season, further enabling rich tax dodgers to run wild with no accountability.
In a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has been serving as acting IRS commissioner since President Donald Trump's removal of Billy Long last August, a trio of Democratic senators stressed that "commissioner of Internal Revenue is not an optional role." The lawmakers—Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—also ripped the Trump administration's establishment of the IRS chief executive officer position, calling it a "fake job that Congress never authorized."
Frank Bisignano is currently the CEO of the IRS, splitting his time there and at the Social Security Administration, his Senate-confirmed role.
The Democratic senators note in their letter that, under federal law, Bessent's authority to serve as acting commissioner expired on March 6, "absent a pending nomination."
"No nominee has been submitted," the lawmakers wrote. "Treasury previously assured [Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley] that a nomination would be forthcoming. That assurance has not yet been honored. The clock has now run out."
"Although the IRS is supposed to be nonpartisan, the only two Senate-confirmed positions at the IRS continue to be held 'temporarily' by Treasury officials who have political jobs," the senators added, referring to Bessent and Kenneth Kies, the assistant secretary for tax policy who is also serving as acting chief counsel of the IRS. (Kies was previously a lobbyist who helped corporations and rich Americans avoid taxes.)
During Trump's first year back in the White House, his administration terminated tens of thousands of IRS employees, leaving the long-underresourced agency with even fewer employees to enforce tax law.
Wyden, Schumer, and Warren wrote Monday that "leadership churn" at the IRS has also been "extreme," pointing out that seven commissioner or acting commissioner transitions occurred in 2025 and most of the agency's dozens of "top official positions" were "either vacant or filled by acting officials as of late last year."
The gutting of IRS staff—including a unit tasked with auditing billionaires—and the leadership vacuum at the top of the agency appear to have been boons for rich tax cheats.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reported last week that "during the new administration’s first year, the US Internal Revenue Service has referred at most two cases of possible tax evasion by ultrawealthy people or large businesses to its criminal investigators, a sharp drop from previous years."
"Not all criminal referrals trigger further investigation or lead to a prosecution," the ICIJ observed. "But they are a key metric of how vigorously the IRS civil divisions are investigating sophisticated tax dodging among high-net worth individuals. The wealthiest Americans account for a disproportionately large share of tax cheating, according to the US Treasury Department, and experts see sophisticated tax evasion schemes as a big contributor to runaway economic inequality."
Corporate tax avoidance is also rampant, thanks in large part to the latest round of Trump-GOP tax cuts enacted last summer. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) noted last month that "annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in US profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9% of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero."
"The tax avoidance of these four companies alone blew a $51 billion hole in the federal budget last year," wrote ITEP's Matthew Gardner, "and this is likely just the tip of the iceberg."
Citing new disclosures, the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition said Monday that major US corporations "collectively reduced their tax bills by more than $11 billion through tax havens in 2025."
"Meanwhile, American companies are getting out of paying a... US minimum tax, which has been effectively dismantled [by the Trump administration]," the coalition said. "The Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, or CAMT, was intended to act as a backstop to ensure that large, profitable companies pay at least some tax, but has been eviscerated via recent regulatory changes that could be unlawful and unconstitutional."
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For-Profit Healthcare Makes Us Sick!
The harmful behaviors of profit-driven healthcare companies—from tax dodging to insurance denials to carelessness with patient safety—stem from the same illness: a disregard for the community they serve.
Nov 02, 2025
Even though most of us think of healthcare as a human right, the reality is that in the United States the provision of healthcare is big business. It places profits over people, demonstrating that priority through tax dodging, price gouging, insurance denials, and unsafe conditions for patients, as documented in a recent joint report from our two organizations, Americans for Tax Fairness and Community Catalyst.
The report, “Sick Profits,” highlights how seven healthcare corporations have together saved over $34 billion in federal taxes thanks to the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law recently extended by the current Trump administration and Republican Congress. They paid for those corporate tax breaks in part by cutting Medicaid and jeopardizing health coverage for 15 million people, and failing to preserve the enhanced premium tax credits for people buying health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplaces.
We currently have public policy that cuts taxes on corporations while ignoring nearly two-thirds of people who believe that big companies are not paying enough. Instead, healthcare corporations have each enjoyed hundreds of millions—in most cases, billions—of dollars in tax savings thanks to the Republican tax law, the most expensive part of which was a two-fifths cut in the corporate tax rate. They have also saved taxes by exploiting loopholes that the law (and its extension) failed to close, including in the accounting for stock options and the treatment of profits shifted offshore.
Not surprisingly, the companies examined in the report did not use their tax savings to lower prices, hire more providers, or improve patient care. No, the money went instead to higher executive compensation and increased payouts to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks.
We must demand more transparency, fairer tax policy, and better oversight of these institutions.
Additionally, companies are maximizing their profits by simply not paying for care. By demanding “preauthorization” for a dizzying number of procedures then routinely denying approval, insurers can save billions at the expense of their policyholders. High percentages of initial denials are overturned on appeal, showing that “no” is simply the initial default position, taken in the hopes that patients and doctors won’t push the issue. Claim denials often result in medical debt and can also disrupt treatment for chronic medical conditions, delay or deny access to lifesaving care, and lead to avoidable complications—or even death.
Claim denials affect the health and well-being of people every day. They are people like Little John Cupp, who began feeling short of breath and experienced swelling in his feet and ankles. His doctor recommended a catheter exam to determine whether the arteries in his heart were blocked. However, the medical benefits management company EviCore (owned by Cigna) twice denied the catheter exam while eventually approving a much lower-cost stress test. The delay in diagnosis proved catastrophic. Less than two days after Mr. Cupp received the stress test, he died of cardiac arrest.
The tragedy of the end of Mr. Cupp’s life demonstrates the incredibly real risks that the first obstacle to getting care creates. Unfortunately, clearing that hurdle and receiving approval for care does not ensure quality. You could find yourself getting treatment at a facility saving money for shareholders by reducing staff and failing to maintain safe and hygienic conditions. NBC News aired a six-part investigation of hospital-operator HCA Holdings that uncovered, in the words of our report, “roaches in the operating room, leaking ceilings, essentially unmonitored vital signs, overworked nurses, overcrowded emergency rooms, closed departments, and other threats to patient health and safety.”
Or you may receive care at a facility owned or controlled by private equity interests. One cautionary tale is Prospect Medical Holdings, which operated hospitals and other health facilities in multiple states and was driven into bankruptcy after it was acquired by a private equity firm that extracted over $650 million in debt-financed dividends from the targeted company. While the private equity partners enjoyed lucrative payouts, patients suffered from unsanitary conditions, supply shortages, insufficient staffing, and shuttered departments.
Our diagnosis is simple but serious. The harmful behaviors of profit-driven healthcare companies—from tax dodging to insurance denials to carelessness with patient safety—stem from the same illness: a disregard for the community they serve. We must demand more transparency, fairer tax policy, and better oversight of these institutions. That means closing tax loopholes, raising the corporate tax rate, curbing the routine denials of coverage, and strengthening regulatory oversight of health facilities. That’s the only way to ensure that people’s needs are prioritized over corporate profits.
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'Wallowing in Corruption': Lobbyist Who Helped Ultra-Rich Dodge Taxes Now Heads Trump Tax Office
"By putting a professional tax dodging consultant in charge of their tax law, Republicans are continuing to make their intentions crystal clear—this law is a gift to billionaires and huge corporations."
Jul 15, 2025
A corporate lobbyist who for decades has helped major companies and rich Americans dodge taxes is now serving as the U.S. Treasury Department's top tax policy official, a position in which he will write rules implementing the newly passed Republican budget law.
That role is "enormously powerful," The New York Times' Jesse Drucker wrote in a Monday profile of Ken Kies, whom the GOP-controlled U.S. Senate confirmed as assistant treasury secretary for tax policy in a party-line vote last month. President Donald Trump selected Kies for the position in January.
The Republican budget measure, which President Donald Trump signed into law earlier this month, contains around $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that will flow disproportionately to the wealthiest Americans over the next decade, according to nonpartisan analysts.
"By putting a professional tax-dodging consultant in charge of their tax law, Republicans are continuing to make their intentions crystal clear—this law is a gift to billionaires and huge corporations like those Ken Kies has spent his career looking out for," Leor Tal, campaign director for the progressive advocacy group Unrig Our Economy, said in a statement Monday.
"As families struggle with rising prices from Trump's tariffs and face devastating cuts to Medicaid and SNAP," Tal added, "Republicans are doubling down on helping the richest of the rich, while working people pay the price."
In his role as a lobbyist whose client list has included Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Microsoft, and other corporate behemoths, Kies has helped secure major tax giveaways for large companies and wealthy Americans—including in the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that the new Republican budget package extends.
"In the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Kies successfully pushed for legislation to make such offshore tax dodges even easier to execute. During the Obama administration, he fended off another attempted crackdown on those strategies," Drucker wrote Monday. "In 2017, as part of a sweeping package of tax cuts signed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Kies lobbied for a new tax break that provides a 20% deduction to certain businesses, which overwhelmingly benefits the richest Americans."
Drucker noted that in his new position, Kies "will oversee about 100 attorneys and economists at the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Policy, a powerful corner of the federal government."
"The office issues regulations to help the government administer tax laws and provides guidance that can render the latest tax-dodging strategy a gold mine—or doom it," he added.
Kies previously served as managing director of the Federal Policy Group, a lobbying firm at which he "delivered significant legislative and regulatory results for his clients, which include major corporations, trade associations, and coalitions of companies with common objectives," according to a since-removed biography of Kies.
"Mr. Kies has led coalition efforts to enact legislation responding to the World Trade Organization's ruling against U.S. foreign sales corporation benefits, to avert enactment of broad 'corporate tax shelter' legislation that would have an adverse impact on legitimate business transactions, and to reverse Treasury regulations targeting 'hybrid' arrangements of U.S. multinational corporations, among other projects," the biography stated.
Highlighting the Times profile of Kies, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote Monday that the Trump administration is "wallowing in corruption."
"Five trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthiest, written and administered by the wealthiest," she wrote. "On the backs of stripping healthcare and food from working and poor people. Shame on you."
In addition to implementing the new Trump-GOP law, Kies could be positioned to help deliver another sizable tax break to the rich.
The Washington Post's Jeff Stein reported last week that on the heels of passage of the GOP budget law, right-wing organizations and Republican lawmakers are set to push the Trump administration to unilaterally "drastically reduce what investors pay on their capital gains."
"The plan rests on changing how the Treasury Department calculates those taxes," Stein wrote. "The highest-earning 1% of Americans would receive 86% of the benefits from indexing capital gains to inflation, while the bottom 80% of income earners would get just 1% of the benefits, Penn Wharton projected in 2018."
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, wrote in response to Stein's reporting that "after gutting health care for millions of Americans and passing massive tax breaks for billionaires, Republicans are now working on even MORE tax breaks for the ultra-rich."
"They aren't interested in fighting for working families—only their rich friends," Boyle added.
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Why Corporate Leaders Who Strip Companies for Parts Have No Business in Government
When corporations prioritize shareholder payouts over real investment, society loses—but when governments adopt the same model, the consequences are compounded.
May 13, 2025
There’s a familiar myth in American politics: that of the no-nonsense business leader who cuts through red tape and gets results. It fuels the belief that running a country is just like running a company—and that executives, with their boardroom instincts and bottom-line mindset, are exactly what government needs.
But that myth collapses under the weight of what corporate leadership has actually become—and what happens when it migrates into public office.
Economist William Lazonick has spent decades analyzing that transformation. He argues that corporate America has abandoned its commitment to innovation and productive investment, replacing it with a laser focus on cost-cutting, price gouging, and tax dodging to boost profits so they can do more stock buybacks—all in the name of maximizing shareholder value. Most executives are no longer rewarded for building durable businesses or contributing to the real economy—they’re rewarded for how efficiently they extract value from the companies that they control.
We’re not just talking about fragile companies. We’re talking about the erosion of public institutions, rising inequality, and a democracy that serves fewer and fewer people.
Lazonick calls this model a “scourge,” blaming it for weakening U.S. technological leadership, driving massive inequality, and destabilizing the broader economy. Now, he warns, this same extractive logic is infiltrating the federal government.
The ongoing 2025 budget debates are a case in point. Under the guise of “efficiency” and “fiscal responsibility,” the Trump administration has proposed slashing $163 billion from federal spending—cuts that would gut education, housing, and medical research—all of which are essential for value creation. The language mirrors what executives have long used to justify layoffs, offshoring, and disinvestment. But in this case, it’s not a corporation being hollowed out. It’s the state itself.
Lazonick argues that this shouldn’t surprise anyone. “Because these people have gotten away with looting corporations, they’ve come to believe it’s their right to loot the state,” he says. Even among tech figures who’ve built or have led the building of real products—like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—Lazonick notes a mindset of entitlement: “They treat the resulting wealth as entirely their own, as if they alone earned it.” That thinking now shapes public policy, where deregulation and budget cuts benefit the wealthy while dismantling protections for workers and consumers.
Take Musk, for example. As head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he’s worked to weaken regulatory agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board—both of which would typically oversee parts of his business empire. At the same time, his companies continue securing massive federal contracts, including a potential $2 billion FAA deal, raising serious concerns about conflicts of interest. As Lazonick and colleague Matt Hopkins argue in a recent piece for the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Musk has advanced through a “perilous system of corporate governance” driven by shareholder primacy—fueling inequality and eroding America’s technological leadership. His tenure at DOGE is simply more of the same: dismantling oversight, channeling public resources into private ventures, and treating government as just another asset to extract.
Musk’s corporate empire—Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink—owes much of its success to taxpayer-funded research and government support. Tesla was launched with the help of federal loans and electric vehicle subsidies. SpaceX builds on decades of NASA-funded R&D and now depends on billion-dollar public contracts. Even Neuralink draws heavily on publicly funded neuroscience work. Despite the mythology of private-sector genius, these companies are deeply rooted in public investment. Yet the public sees little return.
And the mindset isn’t limited to Musk. President Donald Trump and his family are taking the corporate model Lazonick describes to new heights, using government as a platform for private enrichment. Eric Trump recently promoted the family’s latest crypto venture, making the president a major crypto player while shaping federal policy toward that very industry. The Trump family’s 60% stake in World Liberty Financial, now attracting major investment, has intensified concerns over conflicts of interest. Meanwhile, under Eric’s leadership, the Trump Organization has struck a controversial $5.5 billion deal with a Qatari state firm to build a luxury golf resort—despite Trump’s previous pledge to avoid foreign deals while in office.
Trump has also issued executive orders to “streamline” federal procurement and contract reviews. While marketed as anti-waste measures, critics see them as a backdoor for directing government business to favored contractors, including those with family ties. The line between public service and private gain has rarely been thinner.
Lazonick warns that the stakes are high. When corporations prioritize shareholder payouts over real investment, society loses—but when governments adopt the same model, the consequences are compounded. We’re not just talking about fragile companies. We’re talking about the erosion of public institutions, rising inequality, and a democracy that serves fewer and fewer people.
To reverse course, Lazonick argues we need deep structural reform in how corporations—and by extension, governments—operate. That means banning stock buybacks; reining in executive compensation tied to manipulated stock performance; and reinvesting profits in innovation, workers, and communities. It means embracing a stakeholder model of governance that sees corporations not just as wealth machines, but as stewards of social value.
Because if we don’t fix these systemic flaws, the looting won’t stop. It’ll only deepen—and spread.
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'This Is Welfare for Billionaire Tax Cheats': Trump IRS Ditches Effort to Close Major Loophole
"Donald Trump is a known tax cheat, and it's clear his core economic agenda is to turn the government into an ATM for his billionaire pals," said Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden.
Apr 18, 2025
The Trump administration quietly announced Thursday that it is abandoning a Biden-era effort to close a loophole that allows large business partnerships to repeatedly manipulate the value of their assets to minimize their tax obligations.
The Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department announced the decision in a notice that received little attention in the mainstream press. The notice states that the administration, guided by an executive order President Donald Trump signed in February, intends to scrap so-called basis-shifting regulations that were finalized at the end of former President Joe Biden's White House term.
As the Biden Treasury Department explained last year, it was targeting a tactic whereby "a single business that operates through many different legal entities ('related parties') enters into a set of transactions that manipulate partnership tax rules to maximize tax deductions and minimize tax liability."
"These transactions defy congressional intent to avoid tax liability with little to no other economic consequences for the participating businesses," the department said. "For example, a partnership might shift tax basis from property that does not generate tax deductions (such as stock or land) to property that does (such as equipment). Taxpayers may also use these techniques to depreciate the same asset over and over."
The Biden administration estimated that the crackdown on basis-shifting would have raised $50 billion in federal revenue from wealthy taxpayers over a 10-year period.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement Thursday that "this is a ridiculous loophole that allows the ultra-rich to dodge taxes by shifting assets around on paper while adding zero value to our economy whatsoever."
" Donald Trump is a known tax cheat, and it's clear his core economic agenda is to turn the government into an ATM for his billionaire pals, but that doesn't make it any less outrageous that his administration would reopen this kind of tax loophole for the rich while simultaneously wrecking Social Security and attacking Medicaid," Wyden added. "This is welfare for billionaire tax cheats and massive corporations, plain and simple."
The impending removal of IRS regulations targeting the rich comes as the administration is weaponizing the agency against nonprofits and immigrants and as congressional Republicans work on a legislative package that will likely call for massive tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations.
A recent analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the GOP tax package could cost $7 trillion over the next decade, notwithstanding Republicans' misleading efforts to make the tax cuts appear free of cost.
While some congressional Republicans have floated the idea of allowing the marginal tax rate for the highest-earners to return to its previous level of 39.6% at the end of 2025, the proposal appears unlikely to garner enough support in both chambers.
"I think it is a mistake to raise taxes, and I don't believe Republicans are going to do that," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told NBC News earlier this week.
According to Bloomberg, the GOP's tax plan "will almost certainly" reflect "the priorities of a small minority of high-earning constituents in a handful of districts in New York, New Jersey, and California" as Republicans work to raise the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap.
Bloomberg noted that the SALT deduction "is a write-off that most Americans will never claim, even in the districts of the lawmakers fighting hardest to increase the tax break."
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Tax Day Report Exposes Six US Corporate Giants Responsible for Dodging $278 Billion
"Our analysis would indicate that tax avoidance continues to be hard-wired into corporate structures," said the CEO of the Fair Tax Foundation.
Apr 15, 2025
A report published Tuesday to coincide with the tax filing deadline in the United States found that, over the past decade, six of the country's largest tech corporations have paid nearly $278 billion less in taxes than they should have under statutory tax rates worldwide.
The analysis by the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF) estimates that the so-called "Silicon Six"—Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft—paid an average corporate income tax rate of 18.8% on a combined $2.5 trillion in profits between 2015 and 2024.
That's well below the average statutory corporate tax rate during that period in the U.S. (29.7%) and globally (27%), resulting in a "tax gap" of $277.8 billion.
"Our analysis would indicate that tax avoidance continues to be hard-wired into corporate structures," said Paul Monaghan, FTF's chief executive officer. "The Silicon Six's corporate income tax contributions are, in percentage terms, way below what sectors such as banking and energy are paying in many parts of the world."
Of the six corporate behemoths examined in the report, Amazon is the worst tax offender, according to FTF—but all of the companies are guilty of what the group called "aggressive" practices to avoid taxation.
The companies have also benefited greatly from the foreign-derived intangible income tax break. FTF said that, thanks to the tax break, "much of the Silicon Six's overseas revenue is subject to 'tax haven' level rates" in the U.S.
"This is especially so at Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), and Netflix, where the foreign-derived intangible income (FDII) deduction reduced their effective tax rate by a substantial five percentage points each in 2024," the new analysis found. "The FDII has been worth $30 billion to the Silicon Six over the past three years alone."
The analysis comes as Republicans in the U.S. Congress and President Donald Trump work to advance another round of tax cuts that would predominantly benefit wealthy Americans and large corporations. The Trump administration is also trying to gut the Internal Revenue Service with large-scale workforce cuts, which would further hinder the agency's ability to pursue rich tax cheats.
FTF's new report notes the "enormous political influence" that the Silicon Six exert to preserve and enhance their tax benefits: The six companies spent a combined $115 million lobbying the U.S. government and the European Union last year.
To prevent corporate tax avoidance that is costing governments around the world billions of dollars in revenue that could be spent on education, healthcare, and other priorities, FTF said the U.S. should "end the FDII tax break" and back a 15% global minimum tax on multinational corporations.
In February, Trump withdrew the U.S. from a tax agreement that included a global minimum levy.
FTF also urged other governments to "give more serious consideration to the degree to which the Silicon Six's overseas revenue is subject to low levels of corporate income tax and develop more assertive responses to ensure that a fairer tax contribution is secured and so that more equitable business competition can operate within their jurisdictions."
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Trump-Musk Assault on IRS Could Let Wealthy Evade $30 Million in Taxes—Per Day
"By seeking to gut the IRS, President Trump and Elon Musk would make it harder to fight poverty but even easier for the very richest taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe."
Apr 14, 2025
The Trump administration's plan to cut the workforce of the Internal Revenue Service in half and gut enforcement efforts could enable the richest people in the United States to evade an additional $30 million in taxes per day on average, according to an analysis published Monday on the eve of the nation's tax filing deadline.
The analysis by the humanitarian group Oxfam America notes that the firing of 50,000 IRS employees—roughly half the agency's staff—would "hurt ordinary people through slower refunds and customer service, while allowing wealthy tax cheats to pocket billions of dollars."
Oxfam cites a recent study by the Yale Budget Lab estimating that the richest 1% in the U.S. are responsible for around 30% of the nation's unpaid taxes. If the IRS were to lose 50,000 employees, the Yale Budget Lab found, the agency's diminished capacity would result in $395 billion in lost federal revenue over a 10-year period—with the top 1% responsible for $30 million a day.
"While the rest of us dutifully file our taxes, ultra-wealthy tax cheats drain over a half a billion a day from the public coffers," Rebecca Riddell, Oxfam America's senior policy Lead for Economic and Racial Justice. "By seeking to gut the IRS, President Trump and Elon Musk would make it harder to fight poverty but even easier for the very richest taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe. This would undoubtedly be great for billionaire tax cheats but bad for everyone else."
"President Trump and Elon Musk's IRS cuts are part of a broader plan to further rig the tax system to favor billionaires and corporations."
Attacks on the chronically underfunded and short-staffed IRS by the Trump administration and its so-called Department of Government Efficiency are already "tempting taxpayers to cheat," according to reporting by Bloomberg last month.
The administration is also reportedly taking aim at the Justice Department's Tax Division, another possible gift to the ultra-rich.
"When you combine this with the gutting of IRS itself, it basically means a radical diminution of tax enforcement in the United States," Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote last week. "If you make more than, say, a million dollars a year, paying taxes is probably going to be voluntary going forward. It's a new feature of billionairedom."
The administration's slashing of IRS staff, as well as Republican lawmakers' efforts to yank funding from the agency, are expected to further reduce audit rates, particularly for the rich—whose returns are typically more expensive to probe.
But Oxfam America noted Monday that research shows "every $1 spent auditing the top 0.1% yields $6.29 in direct revenue, with total returns likely far higher due to greater deterrence."
"President Trump and Elon Musk's IRS cuts are part of a broader plan to further rig the tax system to favor billionaires and corporations," the group said. "Congress should not only invest in the IRS but also reject efforts to have ordinary people pay for tax handouts to the ultra-rich."
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Trump Letting 'Wealthy Tax Cheats Off the Hook' With Mass IRS Firings
"Trump and Musk care far more about hamstringing the agency in charge of making sure their billionaire buddies pay their tax bills than they do about making tax season bearable for millions of taxpayers."
Feb 20, 2025
At the height of tax season, the chronically understaffed Internal Revenue Service is expected to begin firing more than 6,000 employees on Thursday as part of the Trump administration's large-scale and destructive assault on the federal civil service.
Government Executive reported that the terminations "are expected to affect probationary employees ranging from recent graduates to veterans to specialized auditors across all 50 states."
An unnamed IRS employee told the outlet that Thursday's firings are likely just the start.
"They want to keep cutting," the worker said.
The firings come days after one of billionaire Elon Musk's lieutenants reportedly gained access to a critical IRS system containing sensitive taxpayer data, raising widespread alarm. Musk has also taken aim at the agency's popular Direct File program.
On Wednesday, Trump's newly confirmed commerce secretary said the president's ultimate goal is to "abolish the Internal Revenue Service."
Elizabeth Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement that Trump and Musk are "gutting the IRS in the middle of tax filing season for one reason, and one reason alone: to let wealthy tax cheats off the hook."
"Trump and Musk care far more about hamstringing the agency in charge of making sure their billionaire buddies pay their tax bills than they do about making tax season bearable for millions of taxpayers," said Pancotti.
Groundwork noted that attacks on the IRS will likely have consequences that run directly counter to the stated objectives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
"Recent research found that for every $1 spent on tax enforcement for the wealthy, taxpayers get an average return of $26," Groundwork observed.
Biden-era investments in the IRS, which Republicansstarved of funding for years, yielded significant revenue from wealthy individuals, as the agency had the resources necessary to ramp up audit rates for the rich.
In a letter to top Trump administration officials earlier this week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and other senators warned that the mass IRS terminations and hiring freeze could cause a "tax refund trainwreck."
"It is nearly inevitable that this hiring freeze, compounded by layoffs and further reductions in staff mandated as a result of Elon Musk's unprecedented power grab will delay refunds and degrade taxpayer service," the senators wrote. "Millions of Americans plan their budgets around timely refunds every filing season. These reckless decisions on the part of Elon Musk and the Trump administration will likely cause serious financial hardship for people across the country."
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Tax Dodging by Super-Rich, Big Corporations Costs Nations Half a Trillion Per Year: Study
"The U.K. and the U.S. are both among the biggest enablers and the biggest losers of this lose-lose tax system," said the chief executive of the Tax Justice Network.
Nov 19, 2024
A study published Tuesday estimates that tax dodging enabled by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other wealthy nations is costing countries around the world nearly half a trillion dollars in revenue each year, underscoring the urgent need for global reforms to prevent rich individuals and large corporations from shirking their obligations.
The new study, conducted by the Tax Justice Network (TJN), finds that "the combined costs of cross-border tax abuse by multinational companies and by individuals with undeclared assets offshore stands at an estimated $492 billion." Of that total in lost revenue, corporate tax dodging is responsible for more than $347 billion, according to TJN's calculations.
"For people everywhere, the losses translate into foregone public services, and weakened states at greater risk of falling prey to political extremism," the study reads. "And in the same way, there is scope for all to benefit from moving tax rule-setting out of the OECD and into a globally inclusive and fully transparent process at the United Nations."
The analysis estimates that just eight countries—the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Japan, Israel, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand—are enabling large-scale tax avoidance by opposing popular global reform efforts. Late last year, those same eight countries were the lonely opponents of the United Nations General Assembly's vote to set in motion the process of establishing a U.N. tax convention.
According to the new TJN study, those eight countries are responsible for roughly half of the $492 billion lost per year globally to tax avoidance by the rich and large multinational corporations, despite being home to just 8% of the world's population.
"The hurtful eight voted for a world where we all keep losing half a trillion a year to tax-cheating multinational corporations and the super-rich," Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, said in a statement Tuesday. "The U.K. and the U.S. are both among the biggest enablers and the biggest losers of this lose-lose tax system, and their people consistently demand an end to tax abuse, so it's absurd that the U.S. and U.K. are seeking to preserve it."
"It's perhaps harder to understand why the other handful of blockers, like Australia, Canada, and Japan, who don't play anything like such a damaging role, would be willing to go along with this," Cobham added.
TJN released its study as G20 nations—a group that includes most of the "hurtful eight"—issued a communiqué pledging to "engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed." Brazil, which hosted the G20 summit, led the push for language calling for taxation of the global super-rich.
The document drew praise from advocacy groups including the Fight Inequality Alliance, which stressed the need to "transform the rhetoric on taxing the rich into global reality."
The communiqué was released amid concerns that the election of far-right billionaire Donald Trump in the U.S. could derail progress toward a global solution to pervasive and costly tax avoidance.
The new TJN study cites Trump's pledge to cut the statutory U.S. corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% and warns such a move would accelerate the global "race to the bottom" on corporate taxation.
"People in countries around the world are calling in large majorities on their governments to tax multinational corporations properly," Liz Nelson, TJN's director of advocacy and research, said Tuesday. "But governments continue to exercise a policy of appeasement on corporate tax."
"We now have data from these governments showing that when they asked multinational corporations to pay less tax, the corporations cheated even more," Nelson added. "It's time governments found the spines their people deserve from their leaders."
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Sanders, Schakowsky Introduce Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act
"American workers should not be paying more in federal income taxes, in a given year, than profitable companies like Target, Amazon, and T-Mobile," said the senator.
Apr 10, 2024
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky on Wednesday introduced a bill that aims to close tax loopholes for corporations, end tax breaks for businesses that move jobs abroad, and stop companies from hiding profits in tax havens.
"At a time of massive wealth and income inequality and soaring corporate profits, it is an outrage that many large, profitable corporations continue to pay little to nothing in federal income taxes," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. "As working people struggle to pay rent and put food on the table, we have a corrupt and rigged tax code that is designed to benefit the wealthy and the powerful at the expense of working families."
"Meanwhile, Republicans would make a bad situation even worse by providing even more tax breaks to their corporate campaign contributors and the billionaire class while proposing massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid," he noted, nodding to GOP budget plans for fiscal year 2025, which begins in October.
"That is unacceptable. We need to create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just the top 1%," Sanders asserted. "And, one of the ways we can begin to do that is by making sure that large corporations pay their fair share of taxes. American workers should not be paying more in federal income taxes, in a given year, than profitable companies like Target, Amazon, and T-Mobile."
"We need to create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just the top 1%."
The Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, unveiled as Americans prepare for the federal income tax deadline on Monday, could raise over $1 trillion in revenue over a decade with the tax haven provision alone, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
"Thanks to President Joe Biden, we are growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, but we must go even further by passing the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act to help put the interests of everyday Americans ahead of billionaires and transnational corporations," said Schakowsky. "I thank Sen. Sanders for devoting his career to tackling income inequality and am proud to partner with him on this important measure."
Biden's budget blueprint for the next fiscal year, released last month, includes proposals to hike taxes for corporations and ultrarich individuals—whose wealth is soaring to record heights. Such policies are not expected to pass the divided Congress, but they serve as a clear statement of the Democratic president's position just months away from the November election.
When then-President Donald Trump—now the presumptive Republican nominee to face Biden—signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017, he infamously declared that "corporations are literally going wild over this, I think even beyond my expectations."
Many of that law's cuts are set to expire at the end of next year. During an exclusive Florida fundraiser at the home of a billionaire investor over the weekend, the former president urged his supporters to help him "turn our country around" by taking steps including "extending the Trump tax cuts."
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