Since last fall, the IRS has amassed $1.3 billion in revenue from wealthy taxpayers who evaded paying taxes.
The agency attributed this success to increased spending brought about by President Joe Biden’s landmark climate, health care, and tax package, which was signed into law in 2022.
As Republicans threaten significant future budget cuts for the tax agency should they seize control of the White House and Congress, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel traveled to Austin, Texas, to tour an IRS campus and announce the most recent milestone in tax collections.
Yellen claimed in an Austin address that the wealthiest 1% of Americans owed over 50% of all delinquent taxes in 2019, “leaving ordinary Americans to shoulder the burden.”
“We’ve directed IRS funding towards major investments to combat tax evasion to fix this,” the spokesperson stated.
Laptops 1000The IRS started several programs in 2023 and 2024 to go after wealthy people who have not paid their taxes.
The IRS stated that taxpayers with incomes above $1 million and recognized tax debts exceeding $250,000 are the target audience for this program.
Nearly 80% of the 1,600 billionaires the IRS had targeted for not paying a delinquent tax due have now paid, according to agency officials, and over $1.1 billion has been collected since the program’s inception.
Additionally, the IRS recovered $172 million from 21,000 rich taxpayers who haven’t filed taxes since 2017 in the first half of a new initiative that was launched in February 2024.
Republicans have demanded that the IRS’s funds be reduced.
According to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris “cast the tiebreaking vote to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to go after your tip income.” Trump has promised to substantially cut expenditures on federal agencies.
The plan the Treasury Department put up in 2021 if it received funding, would have hired that many IRS personnel over the next ten years, which is where the disproved claim originates.
Over the next five years, at least 50,000 IRS employees will retire.
The IRS employs about 681 armed agents, according to a 2023 annual report published by the independent IRS watchdog, the National Taxpayer Advocate.
This year, as part of its modernization efforts, the agency also introduced a program called Direct File, which lets individuals with extremely basic W-2s compute and file their taxes electronically with the IRS.
Program participants reported over $90 million in refund claims to the IRS in April.
Twelve states participated in the program for the 2024 tax filing season; however, more states—Maryland, Oregon, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Connecticut, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Maine—have joined for the 2025 tax season.
