The IRS plans to prosecute 125,000 high-income people who failed to file tax returns starting in 2017 — and the agency says hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes are involved in these cases.
Starting this week, the IRS will begin sending non-compliance letters to more than 25,000 people earning more than $1 million a year and 100,000 people with incomes between $400,000 and $1 million who have not paid taxes taxes between 2017 and 2021.
The campaign announced Thursday is part of the agency’s ongoing effort to go after high tax evasions — prompted in part by funding provided through Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in 2022, and a directive from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to IRS leadership to not increase audit. tariffs on people earning less than $400,000 a year.
“When people fail to file tax returns as they are required to do so, it is not fair to those hard-working taxpayers who responsibly perform their civic duty under the laws of our nation,” the commissioner told reporters Thursday morning of IRS Daniel Werfel.
“And when people don’t file their taxes, they need to know there’s a consequence.”
In recent months, the IRS has announced a series of new campaigns aimed at targeting high-income individuals who abuse the tax system or fail to pay their obligations.
For example, IRS leadership said last week that the agency will launch dozens of audits of companies’ private jets and how they are used personally by executives and written off as a tax deduction. And earlier this year, the agency announced that it had collected about half a billion dollars in overdue taxes from delinquent millionaires.
Werfel said the agency’s non-filer programs have only run sporadically since 2016 due to lack of funding and staffing. But since the federal tax collector received resources from the IRA, “the IRS now has the ability to do this critical job of tax administration,” he said.
“We’re not talking about a small group of people.”