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 News from Around the Americas | March 2005 
IRS Measures $300B Gap in Unpaid Taxes
 Mary Dalrymple - Associated Press
Washington — Americans' unpaid taxes are now topping $300 billion a year, with people who underreport their income the biggest culprits.
The government is also losing hundreds of millions of dollars each year because Internal Revenue Service computers don't record interest due on penalties for those unpaid taxes.
The IRS estimated the tax gap, the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid, after auditing 46,000 people and combining those findings with older estimates of unpaid corporate, payroll and unemployment taxes.
The report Tuesday estimated the gap at $312 billion to $353 billion for 2001, about 15 percent of the total taxes owed. Taxpayers were slightly less likely to comply with tax laws than they had been at the time of the latest previous study, completed in 1988.
"This research confirms that the vast majority of Americans pay their taxes honestly and accurately," said IRS Commissioner Mark Everson. "People who aren't paying their taxes shift the burden to the rest of us."
The IRS recovered $55 billion of the unpaid taxes through audits and late payments, leaving a net gap between $257 billion and $298 billion about the same amount as the government expects to spend on Medicare this year.
The majority of unpaid-tax cases involved individuals, not businesses. Among the people who contributed to the tax gap, most understated their income, especially business income.
Excessive deductions, exemptions, credits and other adjustments accounted for $25 billion to $30 billion of the tax gap.
The audits found frequent mistakes reporting alimony income, unemployment compensation and state income tax refunds.
Everson said the tax agency will probably never collect every dollar owed.
"No one should think we can totally eliminate the gap," he said. "That would take draconian measures and make the government too intrusive."
Separately, J. Russell George, the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration, reported that the government loses hundreds of millions of dollars every year because IRS computers don't charge interest on penalties for unpaid tax. |
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