IRS chief: Rich tax cheats, watch out
WASHINGTON — IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel has a message for high-wealth tax cheats who are wrongly deducting private jet travel and otherwise shorting the government on their taxes: Pay your fair share so “others aren’t shouldering the burden of funding our government.”
He also has a thought for ordinary taxpayers putting off the inevitable with less than a month left in tax-filing season: “Get it done.” (And double-check your work.)
Werfel, who will hit the one-year mark at the helm of the IRS in April, said in a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press that the agency will expand its pursuit of highwealth tax dodgers with new initiatives in the coming months and is using tools like artificial intelligence to ferret out abuses and taking the fight to sophisticated scammers.
That doesn’t mean the IRS has undergone a complete image makeover. There’s still plenty of criticism to go around, including from Republican lawmakers who accuse the agency of heavy-handed overreach.
“We’re kind of like the NFL referee — when we get the call right or wrong, we get booed, and we’re OK with that,” Werfel said.
But efforts to crack down on high-wealth tax cheats are starting to bite, he says, and that should mean more money coming in to fund the government.
“It’s having an impact,” Werfel said. Large corporate filers and others are “taking notice that the IRS is ramping up our scrutiny, and I think that will inevitably result in more compliance” — and revenue.
Werfel is promising taxpayers better service this year as he works to repair the agency’s image as an outdated and maligned tax collector. But it’s a tall order for a federal agency that even he has referred to as “iconically unpopular” with the American public.
“We have some mythbusting to do,” Werfel said, referring to alarmist and inaccurate Republican claims that the agency plans to hire 87,000 armed agents ready to harass middle-income earners.
“We are not,” he said. “We are hiring phone assisters armed only with phone headsets. We’re hiring accountants armed only with calculators.”