IRS collected $1 billion in back taxes from millionaires in less than a year

The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday that it has collected more than $1 billion in past-due taxes from millionaires since last fall.

The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday that it has collected more than $1 billion in past-due taxes from millionaires since last fall – thanks to a ramp up of enforcement efforts funded by the Democrat-backed Inflation Reduction Act that passed Congress nearly two years ago. The Biden administration is eager to show how the IRS is using the money to crack down on wealthy tax cheats and improve taxpayers services. Republicans, who have criticized the funding as wasteful spending, have made several efforts to chip away at the 10-year investment provided by the legislation. Last fall, the IRS launched an initiative to collect from wealthy individuals who have not paid the taxes they owe. The agency identified about 1,600 taxpayers with more than $1 million in income and more than $250,000 in tax debt. To date, more than $1 billion has been recovered from those individuals, and the effort is ongoing. Prior to the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS did not have the staffing or resources to pursue high-income earners that the agency knew owed taxes, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said on a call with reporters. “The taxes were clearly owed by these people, but we didn’t have the people or the resources to follow up with them,” Werfel said. The process of collecting past-due taxes starts with a letter to the taxpayer’s home. They are given a certain amount of time to either pay the back taxes or dispute the matter. The rest of the process varies depending on the taxpayer’s situation.