WASHINGTON (AP) — The IRS has collected $1.3 billion from wealthy tax evaders since last fall, the agency announced Friday, thanks to spending that has boosted collection enforcement through President Joe Biden's signature climate, health care and tax package signed into law for 2022.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Wuerfel traveled to Austin, Texas, to tour the IRS campus and announce the latest milestone in tax collections, as Republicans warn that the tax agency's budget will be subject to significant cuts in the future if they control the White House and Congress.
Watch Yellen's remarks in the video player above.
In her Austin speech, Yellen said the top 1% of Americans were responsible for more than a fifth of all unpaid taxes in 2019, and that “ordinary Americans are shouldering that burden.”
“To solve this problem, we have redirected IRS resources to make significant investments in fighting tax evasion,” she said.
read more: The IRS expects the new funding will help it collect hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes.
In 2023 and 2024, the IRS launched a series of efforts aimed at going after wealthy people who don't pay their taxes. The campaign will focus on taxpayers who make more than $1 million and have approved tax debts of more than $250,000, the IRS said.
Agency officials said that since the program began, nearly 80% of the 1,600 millionaires the IRS targeted for failing to pay their delinquent taxes have paid, and they have collected more than $1.1 billion. And in the first six months of the new effort, which begins in February 2024, the IRS collected $172 million from 21,000 wealthy taxpayers who haven't filed a tax return since 2017.
Republicans want to cut the IRS budget.
Donald Trump's presidential campaign said he would drastically cut spending on federal agencies, and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris said in the runoff election that she would “hire 87,000 new IRS agents to go after tip income.”
The now-debunked claim grew out of a plan proposed by the Treasury Department in 2021 to hire this many IRS employees over the next decade, if the funding was available. At least 50,000 IRS employees are expected to retire over the next five years.
The National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent IRS watchdog, released its 2023 annual report, stating that the IRS workforce will be roughly 681 armed agents.
As part of its modernization efforts, the IRS also launched a program this year called Direct File, which allows people with very simple W-2s to calculate and file their tax returns directly with the IRS. The IRS said in April that people who took advantage of the program have claimed more than $90 million in refunds.
The program had 12 states participating in the 2024 tax filing season, but more are joining for the 2025 tax season, including Maryland, Oregon, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Connecticut, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Maine.
