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.
On the flip side, there are people who make much less than that but will (stupidly, IMO) go for some semi-legal tax avoidance schemes just to get the thrill to conning the taxman. It's often more a cultural thing.
Some people seem to find the very concept of taxation to be personally insulting and will do almost anything to avoid paying them. It's a bit like how some deadbeat dads will live in a shack and live off cash gigs to avoid paying child support. Not a great mindset for business though, IMO.
That's part of it, but they're also usually furious at the civil court for siding with her, and a lot of times this translates into the oh-so-common divorced-dad libertarian phase.
SO MANY “sovereign citizen” origin stories start with family court (custody and/or divorce)! They’re FURIOUS because they thought it would turn out differently. Can’t be something they did, it must be ink colors or flag fringes!
my dad tried sooooo hard to get out of having to pay child support through the system, incl trying to convince my sister to opt out so he could just give her the money directly, simply bc he found it deeply humiliating to have the money taken out of his paychecks automatically. very weird mindset
