US Treasury Plans to Raise Additional $700B Through New Tax Compliance Measures
Matthew De Saro, 20 May 2021
The United States Treasury Department released a statement on Thursday announcing their plans to crack down on tax evasion using cryptocurrency. The Treasury Department plans to raise an additional $700 billion through the new tax compliance measures.
In the 22-page report, officials highlighted a number of policies to grow enforcement aimed at combating the expanding tax gap. The tax gap is the calculated difference between what taxpayers are paying and what they actually owe. Currently, the tax gap is around $600 billion annually.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner, however, believes the number could exceed $1 trillion when cryptocurrencies are taken into account. The policies identified include increased reporting requirements, new auditor tools, and new rules specific to cryptocurrencies.
Closing the gap
The plan will require any transfer of $10,000 or more will be reported to the IRS and could raise as much as $2 trillion over the next 20 years. Just getting close to closing that gap could be a huge step in funding President Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar spending proposals. Proposals aimed at bettering childcare, manufacturing, and other domestic priorities.
It was tax season 1999. I was a federal economic-crimes prosecutor in Miami, and this was the time of year my colleagues and I brought cases to deter would-be tax cheats. My target was a tax-return preparer operating out of Liberty City’s “Pork & Beans” projects, made famous in the movie Moonlight. This tax preparer had been manufacturing false W-2s and Social Security numbers so that her clients would receive an earned-income tax credit to which they weren’t entitled—amounting to more than $100,000 in bogus refunds. She eventually pleaded guilty and spent nearly three years in prison, which at the time I considered a broadly just result. She had committed a real crime against the United States. 
Another bitcoin mixing service fraud gets caught with the help of the International Revenue Service, this time catching a suspect of 336 million dollars.
President Biden has come under fire by House Republicans for ‘hypocritically’ using an IRS loophole to avoid paying taxes on $13 million in income for tax years 2017 and 2018, while slamming wealthy Americans for using similar schemes to minimize their tax burden, according to Fox News.