#underfunding the irs

[tomorrowusa]

Trump kept saying that he couldn’t release his tax returns because the IRS was auditing them.

As it turns out, the IRS didn’t even start to audit his returns until April of 2019 and even then barely touched them. They never really finished the audit. And the kicker is that the IRS 2019 audit didn’t start until the exact same day a House committee asked to see Trump’s tax returns. 

Trump filed returns in 2017 for the two previous tax years, but the IRS began auditing those filings only in 2019 — the first on the same day in April the Ways and Means Committee requested access to his taxes and any associated audits, a report by the panel said. The IRS has yet to complete those audits, it said, and the agency started auditing his filings covering his income while president only after he left office.

The revelation could transform the political context of the committee’s nearly four-year fight to obtain information about Trump’s taxes and any related audits. Its chair, Rep. Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, had said the panel needed the data to assess the IRS’ mandatory presidential audit program, but Trump’s lawyers and Republicans called that a pretext for a politically motivated fishing expedition.

The suggestion of dysfunction in the auditing program was an early takeaway in what could be a series of disclosures related to the release of Trump’s returns.

It’s clear why the required audit got such a low priority at the IRS.

Starting in 2018, the IRS was run by a Trump appointee, Charles P. Rettig, who left the post last month. In 2016, Rettig, then a tax lawyer in Beverly Hills, California, published a column in Forbes that defended Trump’s decision not to release his taxes as a candidate.

The IRS did not immediately comment on the matter after the disclosure late Tuesday. But Neal said that when the committee had inquired, “Rettig said at different points that they were simply outgunned” and that the IRS said it lacked specialists capable of assessing Trump’s filings.

A Trump appointee claimed that the IRS was “outgunned” and unable to process the Trump audit. So the Biden administration wants to fund the hiring of 87,000 new IRS employees through 2031 so that the IRS won’t be understaffed and overwhelmed for the rest of this decade. Trump Republicans have objected to these new hirings and tried to distort the narrative to claim falsely that these are agents who would go after the middle class.

In fact, for about the past 100 years the GOP has been trying to keep the rich from having to pay their fair share in taxes. Tax breaks for the filthy rich are usually camouflaged as “economic stimulus”. So keeping the IRS overburdened and understaffed keeps it from looking into the returns of billionaires like Donald Trump.

[cakemoney]

it's getting to that time of year again so. before people start circulating incorrect information on How To File Your American Taxes i would love for everyone to just get in the habit of going directly to the irs website and looking at their FAQs and instructions instead of believing some random user on tumblr has some secret never before known hack about taxes being free

also don't fucking use turbotax it sucks

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #33

Sep 6-13 2024

President Biden marked the 30th anniversary of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act and highlighted efforts to stop gender based violence. the VAWA was written by then Senator Biden and he often talks about it as his proudest legislative victory. The act transformed how the federal government dealt with domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. In part because of the connection to Joe Biden, President Trump and the Republicans allowed the VAWA to expire in 2019. President Biden passed a new reauthorization, with new protections for women against cyber crime, in 2022. On the VAWA's 30th anniversary President Biden announced $690 million in grants to support survivors of gender-based violence.

President Biden and Vice-President Harris announced a new rule to force insurance companies to treat mental health care the same as medical care. The new rule takes on the use by insurance of restrictive practices like prior authorization, and out of network charges, it also closes a loophole in the law that allowed state and local government health insurance not to cover mental health.

The Biden-Harris administration announced that 50 million Americans, 1 in every 7, have gotten health insurance through Obamacare's marketplaces. Under Biden a record breaking 20.8 million enrolled this year. Since the ACA was passed by President Obama and then Vice-President Biden it has transformed American health care bring affordable coverage to millions and getting rid of "preexisting conditions". During the Presidential debate Vice-President Harris defended the ACA and the need to keep building on it. Trump after 9 years of calling for its repeal said he only had "concepts of a plan" on what to do about health care in America.

The IRS announced that it has recovered $1.3 billion in back taxes from wealthy tax dodgers. For years Republicans have tried to underfund the IRS hindering its ability to police high income tax payers. President Biden in his Inflation Reduction Act ensured that the IRS would have the money it needs to chase high income tax cheats. In February 2024 the IRS launched a program to go after over 100,000 people, making $400,000 or even over $1 million a year who have not filed taxes since 2017. The IRS also launched a program to collect from tax payers who make over $1 million a year who have uncontested debt of over $250,000. Between these two efforts the IRS has collected over a Billion Dollars in back taxes from the richest Americans, so far this year.

The Department of The Interior and White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi highlighted green energy efforts on public land. Highlighting two projects planned in Nevada officials talked about the 41 renewable energy projects approved on public land under the Biden-Harris Administration. These projects over 25 gigawatts of clean energy, a goal the Administration's climate plan set for the end of 2025 but met early this year. With the new projects in Nevada this is enough energy to power 12.5 million homes, and the Bureau of Land Management is another 55 utility-scale project proposals across the West.

The Department of The Interior announced $236 million to help fight forest fires and restore landscapes damaged by recent wildfires. Under President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Administration has spent nearly $1.1 billion dollars to combat deadly wildfires which have over the last 10 years grown in size and intensity thanks to climate change.

The Department of The Interior announced $157 million in wetland conservation. The money is focused on protecting bird habitats. It will protect and preserve thousands of acres of wetlands across 7 states.

The US Senate approved President Biden's nominations of Adam Abelson, Jeannette Vargas, Mary Kay Lanthier, and Laura Provinzino to federal judgeships in Maryland, New York, Vermont, and Minnesota respectively. This brings the total number of federal judges appointed by President Biden to 209. When Biden entered office 318 district judges were Republican appointees and 317 Democratic, today 368 are Democratic appointments and just 267 are Republican. President Biden is the first President in history to have the majority of his appointments not be white men and he has appointed more black women to the bench than any President ever.

[liberalsarecool]

Death by a thousand cuts. By underfunding the IRS, Republicans never had to legislate their obvious agenda to protect the wealthy.

Imagine if GOP had to campaign on 'we are going to cut audits on millionaires by 92%'?

Also, when the topic of weaponizing the government comes up, think about the reverse action: a toothless IRS allowing billionaires to evade audit.

[follow-up-news]

The IRS plans to end a major tax loophole for wealthy taxpayers that could raise more than $50 billion in revenue over the next decade, the U.S. Treasury Department says. The proposed rule and guidance announced Monday includes plans to essentially stop “partnership basis shifting” — a process by which a business or person can move assets among a series of related parties to avoid paying taxes. Biden administration officials said after evaluating the practice that there are no economic grounds for these transactions, with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo calling it “really just a shell game.” The officials said the additional IRS funding provided through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had enabled increased oversight and greater awareness of the practice. “These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe,” IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said. Due to previous years of underfunding, the IRS had cut back on the auditing of wealthy individuals and the shifting of assets among partnerships and companies became common. The IRS says filings for large pass-through businesses used for the type of tax avoidance in the guidance increased 70% from 174,100 in 2010 to 297,400 in 2019. However, audit rates for these businesses fell from 3.8% to 0.1% in the same time frame. Treasury said in a statement announcing the new guidance that there is an estimated $160 billion gap between what the top 1% of earners likely owe in taxes and what they pay.

[phoenixyfriend]

"I think the US should have an automatic income tax system instead of forcing us to do it ourselves."

Great!

Increase funding for the IRS.

They've been chronically underfunded since the 1980s.

You want a simpler tax system that impacts rich people as much as the impoverished and the middle class?

Fund the IRS so they have the manpower to do it.

[anarchotahdigism]

thinking about how hundreds of Ukranian mercenaries showed up to help the IOF begin its ground invasion in Gaza around the same time US special forces showed up yet people are still supporting the militaries and governments of the regimes giving real material support to genocide The US cancelled COVID subsidies and gave that $50bil to Ukraine. The US took 14bil in funding from the IRS (which is so understaffed and underfunded it can only afford to go after poor people in audits) to give to the Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestine. Like, Ukraine's still fending off the obviously immoral Russian invasion but still somehow has fighters to spare to support massacring indigenous people? And it just so happens that funding the US's proxy war with Russia is also killing disabled, marginalized, and oppressed people of color in the US and Palestine? how fucking white to manage such effective investments in genocide

[2percentsugar]

it would be 5x easier to convince americans that taxes were good/neutral if the irs weren't so underfunded and bad at its job in all its dealings w average folk

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

IRS pleas for more funding from Congress — made over the years by one leader after another — finally paid off this summer when Democrats tucked an $80 billion boost for the agency into their flagship climate and health care law.

Fortified with a new funding stream, the IRS is making plans to clear a massive backlog of unprocessed tax returns, upgrade technology that is decades out of date and, yes, hire more auditors.

But, as GOP candidates across the country are making clear, the battle over IRS funding has only just begun. They are making attacks on a larger IRS a central part of their midterm election pitch to voters, warning that the Democratic legislation will bankroll an army of auditors that will harass middle-class taxpayers rather than help them.

“If you pass it, they will come — after you,” says an ad running in an Iowa House race that spoofs a scene in the “Field of Dreams” movie. Instead of baseball players emerging from a field of corn, it’s black-suited IRS agents.

The GOP’s warnings are generally alarmist and misleading. The agency is not hiring an army of 87,000 “new agents” to target low- and middle-class Americans. Many hires will be used to replace some 50,000 IRS employee retirements in coming years. Others will become customer service representatives answering taxpayer phone calls.

Some of the IRS hires will be added to the ranks of sophisticated auditing teams that spend thousands of hours poring over complicated returns, but the Biden administration has also made clear that small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in their chances of being audited.

“The purpose of the funding is to modernize a severely underfunded agency to provide the American people with the customer service they deserve,” said Natasha Sarin, Treasury’s Counselor for Tax Policy and Implementation.

But campaign politics has a way of becoming policy. With GOP ads against the IRS blanketing campaign airwaves, funding for the agency appears far from safe and could come under threat as soon as the next Congress is sworn in.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the speaker-in-waiting, has promised that if Republicans take the majority, passage of a bill to repeal the new IRS funding will be their first legislative act.

While such a bill stands little chance of becoming law — President Joe Biden will retain veto power even if the GOP wins control of Congress — Republicans are unlikely to abandon the issue. Their greatest leverage over IRS funding will come when Congress takes up must-pass spending bills to finance government agencies or to avoid a government default on its debt.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist and president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, doubts that lawmakers will go so far as to force a government shutdown in a demand for less IRS funding.

“If it was important enough to shut the government over it, the government would be shut,” Holtz-Eakin said. He noted that lawmakers passed a short-term measure last month to finance the government into December and largely skipped the IRS fight.

Still, some proponents of the additional IRS funding are concerned by the Democratic response to the GOP ads, or to be more precise, the lack thereof. Instead, Democratic groups and candidates are largely focusing their campaign ads on non-economic issues such as abortion rights.

“There’s crickets, is exactly the word, a crickets response from Democrats on this issue,” said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, a liberal-leaning advocacy group.

“This is a story about messaging,” Clemente said. “... Candidates need to be talking about it. They need to be running ads on it. They need to be telling people how they’re going to benefit, not just personally benefit by an improved IRS, but how rich and corporate tax cheats are going to have to pay the taxes that they owe.”

The IRS is still working on the details about how it would spend the extra $80 billion, but it has emphasized that resources would be directed at improving customer service and scrutiny at the high end of the income scale.

Among other things, the IRS says its new funding will be devoted to remedying longstanding customer service issues — like answering the phone. The problem is so pervasive that a bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote to the IRS last November to complain about phone calls being answered only 9% of the time during the 2021 filing season.

The IRS will also be tasked with coming up with how to move forward with an expanded free-file system for taxpayers.

Nina Olson, a former head of the Office of the Taxpayer Advocate, said if funds are cut, taxpayers who have been hoping for better customer service will be most negatively impacted.

“If you don’t want the IRS to handle 85% of incoming calls, then cut the funding — if you want the IRS to continue to have technology that comes from the 1960s, by all means, cut its funding,” Olson said.

Democrats provided the funding boost to the IRS to help pay for other health and climate priorities, such as helping millions pay their health insurance premiums over the next three years and capping insulin costs at no more than $35 a month for Medicare beneficiaries.

Of the additional $80 billion in IRS funding, the legislation allocated $46 billion for enforcing tax laws. The remainder goes to other activities such as services for taxpayers, operations support and updating business systems.

Additional funding for the agency has been politically controversial since 2013, when the IRS under the Obama administration was found to have used inappropriate criteria to review tea party groups and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status.

In the ensuing years, the IRS was mostly on the losing end of congressional funding fights, even as a subsequent 2017 report found that both conservative and liberal groups were chosen for scrutiny.

In April, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told members of the Senate Finance Committee the agency’s budget has decreased by more than 15% over the past decade when accounting for inflation and that the number of full-time employees at 79,000 in the last fiscal year was close to 1974 levels.

Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said if Republicans are successful in cutting funding for the IRS, “it will seriously damage a fundamental function of the government,” she said “which is really troubling.”

“The reality is that government, through the IRS, plays a critically important role in the lives of Americans every day,” she said. “Pretending that role doesn’t exist to score political points is destructive.”

[blackpearlblast]

everything i watch and read is like "yes the IRS could technically prosecute or seize money from you for this but that's exceptionally rare because they're such a shitty little underfunded understaffed incompetent overburdened inadequate government agency"

[mariacallous]

In their first act of legislative business, the new House Republican majority voted to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The vote was a symbolic effort to repeal the $80 billion increase in funding the revenue agency received last year as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Cutting IRS funding is a terrible idea. A well-funded IRS can distribute emergency aid quickly, serve taxpayers efficiently, and help ensure that millionaires have to follow the tax laws just like everyone else. It’s an essential investment in good government.

The IRS has been persistently underfunded for decades, but the years since 2010 have been particularly tough. Tax law expert Chye-Ching Huang notes that the enforcement budget of the IRS dropped by nearly a quarter in less than ten years. In 2017, the IRS employed less than 10,000 revenue agents—the last time that was true was 1953: the Brooklyn Dodgers were in the World Series, the median housing price was about $8,000, and the IRS was handling over 100 million fewer individual income tax returns a year. The IRS is also “overwhelmingly reliant” on antiquated technology, the U.S. Taxpayer Advocate notes, “systems that are at least 25 years old, use obsolete programming languages (e.g., COBOL), or lack vendor support, training, or resources to maintain.”

It is worth noting how much the IRS has managed to achieve despite its perpetually inadequate resources. When COVID struck, for example, only the IRS had the capacity to send millions of emergency checks to keep American households afloat. As my Tax Policy Center colleague Howard Gleckman has said, the IRS “did an extraordinary job in getting these checks out in very difficult circumstances.”

But the budgetary toll of persistent underfunding is unmistakable. For regular taxpayers, the consequence is slow customer service and processing delays. Some politicians have irresponsibly suggested that every new IRS employee will be a gun-toting enforcement agent. Actually, the IRS desperately needs employees to process refunds and answer tax filers’ phone calls. Out of the 282 million phone calls the IRS received in 2021, only 11% or 32 million were actually answered. Nearly half the new IRS money is going to taxpayer services and modernization, which will make the agency more responsive and efficient for taxpayers.

About $45 billion of the $80 billion in new funding is going to enforcement, and that is great news. For the wealthiest and most sophisticated tax filers, a cash-strapped IRS has meant a tax evasion free-for-all. Currently, the tax gap, which is the amount in taxes that are owed but not paid, comes to nearly $7 trillion over a decade. Three fifths of the tax gap is due to underreporting of income by the top 10% of taxpayers, and more than a quarter comes from the top 1%.

But the IRS has been left without the resources to hire and support the kind of tax experts who can catch wealthy tax cheats. The lack of staff was highlighted recently when it was revealed that the audit of former president Donald Trump was staffed by exactly one revenue agent. But Trump wasn’t the only one whose taxes were going without thorough examination. Audits of millionaires have dropped 61% in less than a decade. For those making more than $5 million, the audit rate has dropped 87%.

At the same time, responding to a push from Congress, the IRS has focused instead on a much cheaper form of audit, targeting recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit—i.e. low-income, working families. As a result, the EITC recipients are audited at the same rate as the top 1% of earners. As law professor Dorothy Brown explains, the consequence of high levels of EITC audits is a serious racial disparity in tax policing.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has insisted that the new funding not be used to increase audit rates on those earning less than $400,000 a year. So, the new funding will help rebuild the capacity of the IRS to audit the wealthy, making the tax system far fairer. And, of course, closing the tax gap raises revenues—it’s a policy that more than pays for itself. The IRS investments are expected to raise $124 billion.

The Republican effort to repeal the IRS’s $80 billion funding increase will not move forward in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But the IRS might yet see its funding decline, if the House Republicans negotiate a cut in the budget fights later this year. If that happens, it is bad news for the millions of American households who pay their taxes honestly, and great news for the country’s richest tax evaders. Funding the IRS will shore up an essential government service, making tax filing easier and tax enforcement fairer.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Christopher Weyant, The Boston Globe

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Members of the House of Representatives returned to work today after their summer break. They came back to a fierce fight over funding the government before the September 30 deadline, with only 12 days of legislative work on the calendar. That fight is also tangled up with Republican extremists’ demands to impeach President Joe Biden—although even members of their own caucus admit there are no grounds for such an impeachment—and threats to the continued position of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker of the House.

It’s an omnishambles, a word coined in 2009 by the writers of the BBC political satire The Thick of It, meaning “a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgment results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.” 

It fits. 

In August, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed 12 spending bills covering discretionary funding—about 27% of the budget—by bipartisan votes, within limits set as part of the deal Speaker McCarthy made with President Biden to prevent the U.S. defaulting for the first time in history. 

But the House left for summer break without being able to pass more than one of the 12 necessary bills. The extremists in the House Freedom Caucus oppose the spending levels Biden and McCarthy negotiated, insisting they amount to “socialism,” although with the exception of the Covid-19 blip, discretionary federal spending has stayed level at about 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product since 1954. 

The Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee has reneged on the deal McCarthy struck, producing bills that impose cuts far beyond those McCarthy agreed to. In particular, it cut Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding for programs to address climate change and the Internal Revenue Service, which has been badly underfunded since at least 2010, leaving wealthy tax cheats unaudited. The cuts are ideological: the bills have cut funding for food assistance programs for pregnant mothers and children, grants to school districts serving impoverished communities, the Environmental Protection Agency, agencies that protect workers’ rights, federal agencies’ civil rights offices, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the IRS (on top of clawing back funding in the IRA), and so on.

Although appropriations bills are generally kept clean, the extremists have loaded the must-pass bills with demands unrelated to the bill itself. They have put measures restricting abortion and gender-affirming care in at least 8 of the 12 bills. Even if such measures could make it through the Democrat-dominated Senate—and they can’t—President Biden has vowed to veto them. 

Even fellow Republicans are balking at the attempt of the extremists to get their ideological wish list by holding the government hostage. Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters she doesn’t see how the Republicans are going to get the bills out of the committee, let alone pass them. “Overall, I think it's going to be very, very hard to get these bills forward,” she said.

Far from negotiating with McCarthy over the break, Freedom Caucus members appear to be increasing their demands as a shutdown looms. In August, the caucus announced it would not support even a short-term funding bill unless it also included their own demands for border policy, an end to what they call “woke” policies in the Department of Defense, and what they call the “unprecedented weaponization” of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also oppose funding for Ukraine to enable it to fight off Russia’s invasion.

They have hinted they will use procedural votes to prevent any large spending bill from getting to the floor at all. One of the tools at their disposal is a challenge to McCarthy’s leadership, which thanks to the deal he struck to get the speakership in the first place, a single member can bring. Today, Florida representative Matt Gaetz threatened to “lead the resistance” if McCarthy worked with Democrats to fund the government. 

They have offered McCarthy a way to avoid that showdown: impeach President Joe Biden, although there is no evidence the president has committed any “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for an impeachment. 

Today, McCarthy availed himself of that escape clause. On the first day back from a 45-day August break, rather than tackling the budget crises, he endorsed an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. 

This is a fascinating moment, as the Republicans have opened an impeachment inquiry into Biden with no evidence of wrongdoing. For all their breathless statements before the TV cameras, they have not managed to produce any evidence. Trump's own Department of Justice opened an investigation into Biden four years ago and found nothing to charge. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, Biden’s taxes are public, and a U.S. attorney has been scrutinizing Biden’s son Hunter for years; red flags should have been apparent long ago, if there were any.

Just yesterday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore apart the talking points far-right Republicans have been using to smear the president. He noted that none of the bank records Representative James Comer (R-KY) has referenced show any payments to President Biden, none of the suspicious activity reports the Oversight Committee has reviewed suggest any potential misconduct by Biden, none of the witness accounts to the Oversight Committee show any wrongdoing by Biden, Hunter Biden’s former business associates explicitly stated they had no reason to think President Biden was involved in his son’s business ventures, and so on. 

This inquiry is not actually about wrongdoing; it is a reiteration of the same plan Trump tried to execute in 2019 when he asked Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Biden before the 2020 presidential election. By launching an inquiry, Republicans can count on their false accusations spreading through the media, tainting their opponents even without evidence of wrongdoing. See, for example, Clinton, Hillary: emails. 

McCarthy insisted to reporters that an impeachment inquiry would simply give House committees leverage to subpoena officials from the White House, but during the Trump administration, the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the House must take a formal vote to validate an impeachment inquiry. It did so in reaction to then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s launch of an impeachment inquiry without such a vote, and the decision invalidated subpoenas issued as part of that inquiry. Pelosi went on to hold a vote and to launch an official inquiry.

It will not be so easy for McCarthy. He has not wanted to hold a vote because outside of the Freedom Caucus, even Republicans don’t want to launch an impeachment inquiry when there is no evidence for one. Senate Republicans today were quick to tell reporters they were skeptical that McCarthy could get enough votes in the House for an article of impeachment, and they were clear that a Senate trial was not an option. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO), himself a member of the Freedom Caucus, said: “The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden—if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor. That doesn’t exist right now.” 

The attack on Biden is a transparent attempt to defend former president Trump from his own legal troubles by suggesting that Biden is just as bad. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin today also defended Trump, saying that his prosecutions show that the United States is fundamentally corrupt. His comment made former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) seem to wash her hands of the modern incarnation of her political party. “Putin has now officially endorsed the Putin-wing of the Republican Party,” she wrote. “Putin Republicans & their enablers will end up on the ash heap of history. Patriotic Americans in both parties who believe in the values of liberal democracy will make sure of it.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) summed up the day: “So let me get this straight: Republicans are threatening to remove their own Speaker, impeach the President, and shut down the government on September 30th—disrupting everyday people’s paychecks and general public operations. For what? I don’t think even they know.”

The center-right think tank American Action Forum’s vice president for economic policy, Gordon Gray, had an answer. Ever since the debt ceiling fight was resolved, he told Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, “there’s a big chunk of House Republicans who just want to break something. That’s just how some of these folks define governing. It’s how their constituents define success.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sejantlamb]

tax PSA for US artists

Even if you're not "officially" working as a freelance artist (as a business for profit, which files a Schedule C or similar), you DO still need to declare hobby income, particularly if you use payment processors like Paypal, venmo, etc. which track your transactions. They report to the IRS and the IRS will use the info when reviewing your tax return.

You may be able to get away with not doing it, if you're physical cash-only and there's no paper trail, but I can't recommend it. Firstly, because it'd be unprofessional on my part; secondly, because getting audited by the IRS is not fun and will almost definitely cost you more than you would save in taxes. Don't assume that just because they're overworked and underfunded means that you won't be caught. Better safe than sorry!

[passengerpigeons]

i love filing taxes. i love how doing a paper form means you'll never get your tax return from an overencumbered and underfunded irs. but the free file form online just throws 503s 55% of the time

[gwydionmisha]

This is why republicans keep trying to defund the IRS. It costs money to investigate the richest tax cheats, even though the amount they recover is way higher than the cost of investigating. When the IRS is underfunded they can mostly only afford to audit the middle class, which means they can't recover that much.