About F@#$ing Time

It looks like the IRS has set up a new unit in the organization to go after the tax dodges of the wealthy:

A new Internal Revenue Service enforcement unit targeting the very wealthy will help the tax agency decode partnerships, offshore trusts and other complex techniques used to hide income, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said Monday.

Dubbed the Global High Wealth Industry group, the unit will launch "a small number" of audits of individuals with assets or income in the tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Shulman told an accountants' trade group. An IRS official said the group would begin work on these initial audits in the next month.

The high-wealth group, housed in the IRS's large- and medium-sized business division, marks a sharpening of the IRS approach to auditing the very wealthy. Its creation is a response to the complex web of entities and transactions many high-net-worth individuals use to manage their financial affairs.

This is good for a number of reasons:

• The wealthy are, as Willie Sutton didn't say, "where the money is."
• The tax dodges that they have used have become increasingly more sophisticated, and need a dedicated team with the forensic skills in order to pursue these tax cheats.
• Allowing rich people to evade taxes is corrosive to society, tax collection, and budget decisions, and create an environment where politicians say that you can't raise taxes on the rich, because they will just weasel out of them. (see Bush, George W.)
• If everyone believes that the rich do not pay their share, they will be less inclined to pay their share too, and the cooperation of the taxpayer is crucial to our system working.

Now what they need to do is go go criminal prosecution, with jail time, on the some of the worst offenders.