Headline Roundup • September 6th, 2024
The IRS Recovers $1.3 Billion in Unpaid Taxes From Wealthy Americans
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Since late 2023, the IRS has recovered $1.3 billion in unpaid taxes from high-income Americans, according to the Treasury Department.
The Details: The money was collected due to new initiatives launched by the IRS following increased funding from the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022. In February 2024, the IRS began pursuing 125,000 “high-income, high-wealth taxpayers” who had not filed taxes since 2017. Six months later, around 21,000 of those taxpayers had filed their taxes, amounting to $172 million in recovered funds.
For Context: In a 2019 speech, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the top one percent of wealthy Americans owed more than one-fifth of all unpaid taxes.
How the Media Covered It: Media across the spectrum focused on the improvements made to the IRS. The Washington Times (Lean Right bias) also included Republican concerns that President Joe Biden "supercharged" the IRS.
Featured Coverage of this Story
The IRS said Friday that it has recovered $1.3 billion in unpaid taxes from high-income Americans who had either failed to file their returns or who hadn't fully paid what they owed.
The announcement, made jointly with the U.S. Treasury Department, is aimed at highlighting the agency's ramped-up enforcement efforts against tax cheats, which have been funded under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
That IRS funding has proved controversial, with some Republican lawmakers falsely claiming the money would be used to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to "to audit Walmart shoppers."
The Treasury Department announced Friday that it had recovered $1.3 billion of unpaid taxes from high-income Americans.
The recovered money comes as part of the effort to ensure wealthy individuals pay the taxes they owe under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, according to the department’s release.
Washington Times
The IRS has now clawed back $1.3 billion from the country’s wealthiest taxpayers using initiatives launched after President Biden won historic funding increases for the tax agency. Democrats’ budget-climate law in 2022 infused tens of billions of dollars into the IRS, with a large chunk of that dedicated to audits Mr. Biden said would force the wealthy to pay what they owe. One of those initiatives targeted 125,000 wealthy households that hadn’t filed taxes for years. Six months into the effort, some 21,000 of them have paid up, to a...
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