I'm getting the 'rich people do fraud' stuff this morning, and the answer as a professional is that the common person intuition that we don't do enough enforcement against fraud is correct but the intuition that most rich people are engaged in some level of knowing fraud is wholly wrong
The at-highest possible ceiling I'd put it at is 10% of the population, and I would wager the majority of that is immaterial, but the small 1% of people are doing an -insane- amount of obvious fraud all the time
There is a very large portion of rich people who are at least twice that ceiling who are -incredibly- fastidious on the compliance side of both their businesses and their personal tax and even eschew tax strategies to reduce tax paid for fear of nonexistent concerns that I have also allayed.
When you make 20 mln USD a year, paying even 10 mln in tax instead of 1 mln doesn't hurt because at the end of the day you still made 10 mln! And you have a clean conscience.
More to the point, it's better to pay a bunch of tax to the system that protects your wealth and lifestyle than it is to risk turning that system against you by committing a crime.
Even people who get rich through literal criminal activity tend to want to go straight after a certain point.
At least as long as the interest rates are near zero.
BTW, I know from bitter family experience that "get it wrong" can mean also "believing the tax office employee telling you you got it right and later being told they changed their mind".
Do I feel a kind of way about taxpayer and client mistakes after dealing for years with the IRS make obvious clerical mistakes and punishing taxpayers and my current and future clients with liens and scary letters? Yeah, I sure as fuck do, actually
I had a very unwelcome, expensive education in tax policy while trying to persuade the Canada Revenue Agency that I was, in fact, a full-time student while on a scholarship to do my Master's.
Vibing as I'm nodding along to a payroll issue we have filed amendments for three times over five years on an issue that the IRS has agreed multiple times over the five years should be solved by filing an amended return. This will be the third no-change amended return to fix the problem
Polish tax office once asked me to submit an amended tax return to include two British pounds of bank account interest I forgot to include. I politely ignored them.
It could be! My very brief and limited experience in a regulatory field was that big corporations would fight any new regulations tooth and nail in court, lose, and then comply with them fastidiously, whereas smaller ones would break regs by accident a lot. Could be the same here.
