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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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