Yeah, most of this likely comes from corporations, billionaires, and other obscenely wealthy entities; the kinds of people who use the term "off-shore account" on a regular basis make up the bulk of this debt.
I agree. The way this is worded, it makes it sound like the everyday American isn’t paying up. My guess is, they just started checking with Biden’s admin.
Assuming the amount of “real value” people don’t pay stays close to the average, won’t most years have the largest shortfall ever recorded, just because inflation exists?
This is why I don’t pay attention to movies breaking box office records anymore either; if you adjust for inflation, Gone with the Wind is still the recordholder, and not one single movie has broken into the top 10 since Titanic. But every year, some movie touts its status as the highest grossing film of all time because that’s, you know, how money works.
Yep. The same goes for stories about record corporate profits or record employee wages, or essentially any statistic reported as nominal dollars. Metrics like margins, ratios, or income-adjusted dollars are always much more useful, unless you're trying to push an agenda of some sort (even one as benign as generating an attention getting headline).
Not quite. Microsoft owes back taxes from 2004 to 2013 totalling $29 billion.
The $688 billion figure is the collective shortfall from 2021.
So really Microsoft owes $29 billion dollars on top of the $688 billion that all the other rich people and corporations owe, but adding those numbers together doesn’t mean anything because these stories are largely unrelated. There is a shortfall every year because of tax evasion that comes out to trillions of dollars collectively if we’re counting back to 2004.
The likelihood of going to jail for messing up your taxes is extremely low. The IRS cares much more about receiving its money, even years later, than sending people to jail.
Yeah, speaking from experience all they do is ask you to show up at an IRS office and ask you to correct the mistake and verify things in person for an hour
in the UK the majority of employees don’t even sign a tax form, the correct amount of tax just gets taken out your wage and at the end of the year the inland revenue send you a cheque or a bill for if you paid too much/little.