W. Edward Afield III (Ave Maria),A Market for Tax Compliance, 62 Clev. St. L. Rev. 315 (2014):
It is becoming increasingly clear that, due to political realities and budgetary constraints, the IRS is going to have to attempt to enforce the tax laws by doing more with less. Current enforcement efforts have yielded a tax gap (i.e., the difference between the amount of taxes that should be paid and the amount that are collected) of roughly $450 billion annually. Faced with this task, one of the steps that the IRS has recently taken is to try to improve the quality in services performed by paid tax preparers, a group that historically has been subject to little IRS regulation or monitoring but that continues to play an increasingly important role in the tax system.
Bloomberg, How to Audit the President, by Richard Rubin:
The presidency is laden with perks: the jet, the mansion, the personal chef.
But there's some nastiness, too, awaiting the winner of the 2016 election, namely: mandatory audits from the Internal Revenue Service. The tax returns of the commander-in-chief and the vice president get automatic annual scrutiny from the IRS. Compare that to the 1 in 49 audit rate for everyone else in the $200,000 to $500,000 income bracket.
The USC law professor was referring to the reactions elicited by his recent op-ed in the New York Times, in which he asserted that the solution to economic inequality in the U.S. was not to make the tax system more progressive — it's already "the most progressive in the developed world," he wrote — but to make it bigger.
Trying Times 2014: Important Lessons to Be Learned from Recent Federal Tax Cases, by Nancy A. McLaughlin (Utah) & Steven J. Small ( Law Office of Stephen J. Small, Newton, MA)
Trying Times 2014: Important Lessons to Be Learned from Recent Federal Tax Cases, by Nancy A. McLaughlin (Utah) & Steven J. Small ( Law Office of Stephen J. Small, Newton, MA)
