The federal government is losing hundreds of billions of dollars annually in tax revenue, with the main culprit being underreporting by taxpayers, according to the IRS.
The tax gap “reflects the difference between projected ‘true’ tax liability and the amount of tax that is actually paid on time,” the IRS said.
“The increase for 2022 is similar to the 41 percent increase in the economy since the 2014–2016 time period as measured by the Gross Domestic Product,” the agency noted.
The voluntary compliance rate among taxpayers remained steady at 85 percent. The 2022 tax gap increase “ultimately reflects growth in the economy and changes in the sources of income—not a change in taxpayer behavior involving filing or paying their taxes,” the IRS stated.
The latest projections are from a period before the IRS began increasing tax compliance work after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in August 2022.
Since then, the agency “has stepped up compliance activity” and collected $1.3 billion from high-income taxpayers, the tax agency noted.
IRS Tax Gap Flaws
IRS tax gap estimates have been criticized by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). In calculating estimates, the IRS applies a statistical technique to account for noncompliance that was undetected by audit examiners, GAO said in a May 6 report.“Applying this technique nearly doubles the individual underreporting tax gap estimate, increasing the estimate from $145 billion to $278 billion,” it noted. “IRS has not conducted analysis to understand the causes of this estimate of undetected noncompliance.”
GAO also criticized the agency’s strategic operating plan (SOP), which outlines how the tax agency intends to spend the billions of additional funding received under the Inflation Reduction Act.
“The SOP is not clearly linked to tax gap data,” the office stated in the report. “For example, the plan does not address sole proprietor noncompliance, which is one of the largest areas of tax noncompliance.”
The tax agency has been unable to stem the increase in improper payments paid to taxpayers via programs such as the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, the foundation said.
In 2022 alone, $26 billion of the $98 billion in tax credits paid out by the IRS were overpayments. These overpayments were partly due to IRS failures and other issues such as the complexity of the tax system, the foundation said.
The idea that plugging the tax gap would somehow solve the federal government’s budget issues is untrue, it stated. The foundation calculated that even if Americans were 100 percent tax compliant, it still would not balance out the budget.
“The tax gap is based on the IRS’s benchmark estimate of how much the government would collect if taxpayers were 100 percent compliant, what they call the ‘Estimated Total True Tax Liability,’” Tax Foundation President Emeritus Scott Hodge wrote. “This, of course, is an ideal that has never been achieved in any tax system in history. Markets and people are remarkably adept at altering their behavior to minimize their tax burden.”
Hodge added that the United States does not have a unique problem with tax evasion and is actually below average when compared to tax gaps across the West.
The Epoch Times reached out to the IRS for further comment but did not hear back by publication time.