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Published: Monday, 13 May 2013 | 2:01 PM ET
By: Robert FrankCNBC Reporter & Editor

IRS Takes a Closer Look at the Wealthy







News that the Internal Revenue Service scrutinized conservative political groups has put the spotlight on another IRS target: the wealthy.
Audits for wealthy taxpayers have surged in recent years, leading some conservatives to question whether the IRS is unfairly focusing on those with high incomes. According to IRS data, taxpayers making $1 million or more are more than 12-times more likely than the rest of the population to be examined.
The IRS said for its 2011 examinations of 2010 returns, about one in a hundred Americans were audited. The IRS, however, audited 3.8 percent of returns for those making $200,000 or higher. The agency audited 12.5 percent of returns for those making $1 million or more.
Arthur Laffer, the conservative anti-tax crusader, said the IRS should not be picking audit targets based on their income levels.
"They should not be auditing people based on profit maximization," Laffer said. "It means that people who skim below the top levels won't be audited and it's tax cheats galore." He added that giving the IRS audit power gives it a "very powerful tool that they can use in the political process."
The IRS didn't immediately comment.



Yet former IRS officials and tax experts said audits of the wealthy are driven by economics and statistics—not politics.
(Read More: IRS Scrutiny Targeted Political Advocacy Groups)

Eric J. Toder, a co-director of the non-partisan Tax Policy Center and former director of research at the IRS, said, wealth audits and the controversy over conservative groups are "two totally different things."
The issue with conservative groups "has nothing to do with raising money, at least not directly," while audits are aimed at insuring that taxpayers pay their required amounts of tax.


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IRS Targeting the Wealthy?

The Internal Revenue Service may be watching the very rich, reports CNBC's Robert Frank.

"To suggest that there is a political motive behind audits of the wealthy, you'd have to see some evidence that they're targeting people with a particular political view among the wealthy. Wealth as a criteria is not a political criteria."
The IRS looks for several characteristics—not just wealth—when determining audits, he said. Filers with complex returns and business income tend to have the most errors, and since the wealthy often have business income, they attract more audits.

He added, the wealthy also generate the highest returns for auditors. According to the IRS, its examinations of people earning $1 million or more generated $4.8 billion in additional revenue, averaging about $117,000 per return.
(Read More: IRS to Conservative Groups: Sorry!)

"It doesn't serve anyone in terms of IRS or costs to put someone through an audit and then find they don't owe anything or they owe a small amount," he said.
And tax experts say audits of the wealthy will only increase in the coming years. In 2009, the IRS created a special group targeting the ultra-wealthy, called the Global High Wealth Group, staffed by experts in closely held companies, trust and estates law and overseas accounts. Tax attorneys say that after a four year ramp-up, the group has now gotten more aggressive.
The IRS has also started highlighting the group to tax attorneys and wealthy taxpayers.
"The IRS is clearly sending a message and beating the drum about this," said Charles M. Ruchelman, a tax attorney and partner at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington. Wealthy taxpayers, he said, "need to start thinking about this and being prepared."
That includes getting documents for the past three years of transactions and looking more closely at their returns.

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IRS's message..........

If ya wanna bitch about singling out tea partiers..........

We will single out all wealth ...........


This is a win win for us...........

[MUHerd37]

The wealthiest have people doing their taxes for them.

[PAULYPOKER]

[PAULYPOKER]

Corporations, humans and taxes



The question for people who live and work abroad is whether they can turn themselves into corporations. Corporations are, as lawyers have known for years, and as the now famous case of Citizens United reminded us, (even though it did so by being misread by many commentators) people just like the people who live in the house next door. Since corporations are people and have the same rights as people, the question people of the flesh and blood kind ask is why human persons are not entitled to the same tax benefits as Congress gives corporation persons.

American citizens are taxed on their worldwide income, irrespective of where in the world it is earned. An American who works all year in France is taxed by the United States on every penny of earned income in France just as if the American had earned that money working in the United States. (The Internal Revenue Code in fact provides for a foreign earned income exclusion that permits U.S. citizens working abroad to exclude from income up to $92,500 in foreign earnings and, in addition, they can deduct certain housing amounts they receive while working abroad. Everything in excess of those permitted exclusions, however, is taxed the same as if the citizen were working in the United States.) Recent news caused persons working abroad to realize that their kind of persons are treated grossly different from corporate kinds of persons and that would seem to be a clear violation of the Equal Protection clause of the United States Constitution.

The equal treatment for tax purposes came into focus because of recent news about the practice of large United States corporations of diverting billions of dollars of work into foreign subsidiaries. Those transfers protect the earnings of those subsidiaries from U.S. taxes unless the parent company repatriates the earnings into the United States. So long as the earnings are held abroad they are not taxed. The amount that the U.S. corporation persons may exclude is not the $92,500 that human persons may exclude. It is all of the earnings of the subsidiary. Those amounts are often in the billions. If that rule were applied to human persons they would not owe income tax if they spent their earnings outside the United States.

A Wall Street Journal article described in some detail how many U.S. corporations take advantage of this tax law. According to the WSJ, in 2012 60 large U.S. corporations parked $166 billion overseas thus enabling them to protect 40% of their profits from U.S. taxes. The only time those profits will be taxed by the IRS is if the company brings those earnings into the United States. Among the companies surveyed, the WSJ reported that Abbott Laboratories has $40 billion in untaxed overseas earnings, Honeywell International Inc. has $11.6 billion, Microsoft Corp. has $60.8 billion and Apple has $100 billion.

That report came at the same time it was announced that Apple planned to buy back $50 billion of stock from shareholders. Since Apple has $100 billion parked overseas it would be easy for Apple to use those funds to effect the buyback. Repatriating those funds, however, would cost it approximately $9.2 billion in taxes that it would prefer not to pay. Therefore, it has issued a $17 billion bond offering with a relatively low interest rate. The $308 million interest it pays on those bonds will be deducted by it on its tax returns giving it approximately a $100 million income tax deduction. In addition to enjoying the tax deduction, it avoids the $9.2 billion it would have had to pay had it repatriated funds in order to effect the buyback.

It does not take a tax scholar to realize that the deal corporate persons get on money they earn abroad is much better than the deal human persons get. If corporate persons got the same deal as human persons then corporations that had earnings abroad in a given year of $1 billion, would have to pay tax on $999,907,500 instead of on $1 billion. The difference would save the companies more than $3000 in taxes, a somewhat less favorable result than saving $9.2 billion.

There will undoubtedly be the occasional scholar who will remind the writer that a subsidiary of a corporation is not the same as the corporation itself and, therefore, the foregoing analysis is flawed. The commentator may also observe that in fact Citizens United did not arrive at its conclusion by addressing “personhood” and, therefore, this entire commentary is meaningless. The proper response to the first criticism is if the subsidiary is simply an offspring of the parent corporation then the rule should be that any children of U.S. citizens working abroad should be given the benefit of the tax treatment that is accorded the subsidiary of corporations. That is, of course, a silly distinction and one that no court, except perhaps the United States Supreme Court, would accept. The proper response to the second criticism is “and your point is?”

ARA/DB