Toward Stronger and Fairer Tax Enforcement

Under the status quo, the United States will lose about $ 7 trillion in tax revenue owed but not paid, mostly by the richest Americans, over the next 10 years. Over the past decade, the IRS’s ability to enforce tax laws has been severely constrained by budget cuts and staff emigration, and the tax office lacks the modern technology necessary for effective enforcement and quality taxpayer service. Because the IRS lacks sufficiently experienced enforcement personnel to audit complex tax returns such as those made by wealthy individuals and large corporations, the IRS has focused a greater portion of the audits on low-income workers, which is detrimental to inequality and racial justice as well Federal Revenue Effects.

The Biden administration has proposed an important initiative to strengthen tax enforcement and make it fairer by shifting enforcement resources towards wealthy Americans and businesses. The key elements of this initiative are pending in Congress.

Please join the Center for American Progress and a respected body of current and former Treasury and IRS officials to discuss the status of this initiative in Build Back Better legislation and how to proceed.

We’d love to hear your questions. Please direct questions to our renowned committee by emailing CAPeventquestions@americanprogress.org. Live subtitles will be available on Zoom and on the YouTube livestream.

Panelists:
Fred Goldberg, Commissioner, Internal Revenue Service, 1989-1991
Chye-Ching Huang, Executive Director of the Tax Law Center, New York University
Jacob J. Lew, US Secretary of the Treasury, 2013-2017
Natasha Sarin, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Policy, US Treasury Department

Moderator:
Jean Ross, Senior Fellow in Economic Policy, Center for American Progress

https://www.americanprogress.org/events/2021/10/29/506746/toward-stronger-fairer-tax-enforcement/