Quatloos!

Well worth the read - the word chutzpah comes to mind for these bozos:

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNL ... 9090671&kw

Wright, who asserted that the attorneys had not paid taxes on the settlement payments they had obtained in numerous cases, said he would refer the matter to the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service.

Just the tip of the iceberg. It's the cash economy, and if the tax police were to go to town with expanded audits on many small business people, they would pay their salaries many times over with funds raised.

I have long maintained that if the IRS hired retired tax practitioners to select and perform audits and paid them 1% of the funds collected, the retired practitioners would make tons of money and we would go a huge way to resolving the tax collection gap. Nobody knows where the bodies are buried better than the undertakers.

Duke2Earl wrote:I have long maintained that if the IRS hired retired tax practitioners to select and perform audits and paid them 1% of the funds collected, the retired practitioners would make tons of money and we would go a huge way to resolving the tax collection gap. Nobody knows where the bodies are buried better than the undertakers.

Which would only open the door to accusations that payment of commissions encouraged audits that inflated the numbers, that the audits selected were not an accurate and fair representation of the taxpayer population (since auditers would only focus on the wealthiest taxpayers who would be the easiest to collect from), that the auditors only assessed as much tax as they think could collect quickly rather than the actual tax owed, and that corruption set in as auditor acccepted bribes for amounts in excess of the 1% commission because it was still cheaper for the taxpayer to pay a 5% bribe vs. the 100% of the tax.

Many of the above situations occured in the IRS prior to the reform of the agency back in the 50s. This is why the auditing and collection functions were separated and why the attempt by the IRS to contract out collections to private agencies didn't work.