Tax evasion is at the center of the criminal cases against two associates of the president, Paul Manafort and Michael D. Cohen.
The sheer scale of their efforts to avoid paying the government has given rise to a head-scratching question: How were they able to cheat the Internal Revenue Service for so many years?
As The New York Times reports, researchers and former government auditors say the answer is simple: The I.R.S. pursues fewer cases of tax evasion than it did less than 10 years ago. Provided you’re not a close associate of the president, there may never be a better time to be a tax cheat.
Last year, the I.R.S.’s criminal division brought 795 cases in which tax fraud was the primary crime, a decline of almost a quarter since 2010.
Bringing cases against people who evade taxes on legal income is central to the revenue service’s mission. In addition to recouping lost revenue, such cases are supposed “to influence taxpayer behavior for the hundreds of millions of American citizens filing tax returns,” Fort says. With fewer cases, experts fear, Americans will get the message that it’s all right to break the law.
Starting in 2011, Congress repeatedly cut the I.R.S.’s budget, forcing the agency to reduce its enforcement staff by a third. But that drop doesn’t entirely explain the reduction in tax fraud cases.
