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Internal Revenue Service Vows To Make The Richest Americans Pay Their Dues

If you're insanely wealthy, hold on to your seat: the Internal Revenue Service is out to get you. That is, if you have been scamming Uncle Sam. Last tax season it was made apparent that the IRS was leaner, meaner, and that it was on the lookout for tax evaders. This past fall, the IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman announced something called a "Global High Wealth Exam Group." The main task of this group is to make sure that the richest people in America are paying what they owe in taxes.

If you have a nice house in a nice neighborhood, you need not worry. When they say "global wealth" they MEAN global wealth. Like, so rich that you wouldn't even be reading this yourself, you would be paying a servant to read it to you. People with incomes in the tens of millions of dollars. According to the most current IRS information, in the year of 2004 there were about 47,000 individual taxpayers with a net worth of $20,000,000 or more.

This past year the news presented us with many articles about the wealthiest people in the country stashing assets in offshore accounts to prevent their massive stacks of cash from being proportionately, and legally, taxed. In fact, by last November, almost 15,000 individuals had "voluntarily" reported their illegal activity to the IRS. That just goes to show you that if you make enough money, you can buy the prerogative to avoid going to jail for breaking the law by being forced to volunteer financial information.

This selfish, disturbing behavior of some of the wealthiest people in the country is not the sole reason for this new program. When someone reaches a certain level of wealth, things get more complicated with trust arrangements, private equity and hedge funds, private foundations, and multi-tiered partnerships. Additionally, the world has gotten smaller, and many of these entities are foreign based which complicates things for the IRS further. It makes sense that it would take a team of experts to tease all of these issues out.

Therefore, the "wealth squads" appeared out of the woodwork in part this tax season, complete with entire teams of Internal Revenue Service agents, partnership experts and international examiners. Specialists in the areas of retirement plans, insurance and annuity arrangements, exempt organizations, and financial instruments will be introduced to go through the Forms 1040 AND any and all related returns. The IRS warns us that a criminal investigation agent could potentially be asked to join the group.

So what are these poor, defenseless multi-millionaires to do? Well, if they have been honest in the past and paid the fair amount of money that they owed to the country, they have no need to worry. For the rest, it may have seemed like a good idea to walk on the wild side of audits a few years ago, but now it doesn't seem like such a smart decision.

Mallory Megan works for Rapid Recovery Solutions and writes articles on national collection agencies This article, Internal Revenue Service Vows To Make The Richest Americans Pay Their Dues is released under a creative commons attribution licence.

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