• Twinkletoes@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    Wait so we spent $80 billion dollars to recoup $1 billion dollars?! 😵‍💫

    • MrVilliam@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Nope. $60B was allocated to the IRS. They’ve spent $5.7B of it so far, most of which I’m assuming was for hiring and getting their ducks in a row to start being able to go after the big fish. It’s actually pretty impressive that they’ve found so much revenue in such a short amount of time that would’ve just not been collected.

      It’s from January, but here’s some other info on this that’s a little more in depth than that shitty nyt article.

    • AlternatePersonMan@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      So far $5.7 billion has been spent. The total approved funds were actually $60 billion. That ratio does seem sketchy, but the article mentions the money will be spent on other upgrades as well, such as customer service, though it fails to go into much detail.

      I recall reading that increasing IRS funds tend to yield significantly higher earnings, but the article doesn’t provide any depth there. The proposal mentions that they expect to bring in $200 billion. That sounds disappointingly low to me. I was hoping for something more like a 10-1 return, but I imagine auditing those armed to dodge taxes isn’t easy.

      • barkingspiders@infosec.pub
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        5 months ago

        It can take time too. One of the ways rich people skirt taxes is paying lawyers to drag things out in court. IRS doesn’t just have to hire new people to do complicated audits on rich people, they also have to pay lawyers to enforce their findings in the courts. Ramping up new agents to handle the audits and going through any court procedures can take years.

    • HONEYBADGER517@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Not exactly. Per the article only 5.7 bil of the 80 bil has been spent so far. Also per the article, 20bil has also been cut from that total in budget negotiations. And, not all of that goes to tracking down mil/billionaires. An unspecified amount goes to modernizing their systems and improving their ability to respond to calls from taxpayers.

      I imagine there are plenty of things not listed that they are doing to improve their resources with the money. Id wager that given time we’ll see larger returns on investment as they get through their backlog of unpaid taxes. But that’s just my opinion.