Is that what 1,600,000 businesses are telling the IRS? As of the beginning of this fiscal year that's the number of businesses that owed us a total of $58 billion in payroll taxes, including penalties and interest. What is the IRS doing to collect?
Not much it appears. They are focusing on asking these deadbeats to pay up. They could file tax liens. They could assess penalties on individuals. And some of these deadbeats don't seem to be very nice people. One owes us almost $2,500,000 yet he doesn't report his true income and, according to the GAO, may be involved in check kiting and money laundering. Another has a scheme whereby he files for bankruptcy just after he takes out a large amount of cash from the business. A third sold his property to his kids for less than market value so the IRS would bet nothing. As a result of these delinquencies we have to put more into the Social Sscurity and Medicare trust funds.
The problem is getting worse. In 1998 there were 5,367 businesses with over twenty quarters of unpaid taxes; in 2007 that number was 14,681. Those companies who hadn't remitted their payroll taxes in forty quarters - that's ten years - went from 86 to 490 in the same time period.
As Dirksen was quoted, "A billion here, a billion there and soon you have some real money." Or, something like that.
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