It remains to be seen whether Congress will try to offset their $1.5 trillion tax cut by increasing IRS enforcement to collect unpaid taxes. Recent patterns of the GOP Congress lead us to believe that they won't. In spite of reduced IRS collections, the US Government still collects over $3 trillion revenue in every year since 2014.
Our observations of this past year are that:
Revenue Officers (RO's) throughout the U.S. still collect from folks who haven't filed in a while or owe a great sum to the IRS. When they get these bigger cases (but sometimes small ones too) they do enforce missed deadlines by imposing levies against wages and bank accounts. People and businesses are hiring WATAX to represent them on these higher-stakes type of cases.
The Automated Collection Systems department of the IRS has been incredibly dormant in the last year, rarely issuing levies. But they still seem to be keeping people's attention by filing tax liens.
The IRS Criminal Division is certainly NOT pursuing many tax evaders and willful non-filers with only 3,395 cases in 2016?
We predict that 2018 will be similar to 2017. No dramatic cuts in IRS enforcement but not a big increase either. We'll see how the tax cuts play out in the economy and whether the supply siders are right in that they actually increase revenue? Either way, the staff of WATAX will be closely observing how the IRS and Congress work to better our customer's outcomes.
