Coffee Indiana: Did grand jury duty for a year and one of the crazier revelations was the tax fraud cases where people would just submit tax returns with made up numbers under other names, calculated to give a return of like $10-$100k. They were easily caught because it was linked to their bank account 🤦

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.

There are so many people for whom 'doing it right all the time' actually is their intrinsic motivation and honestly Thank God

Friend of mine who works at the IRS pointed out that nearly all of US tax collection relies on voluntary compliance and I was like "damn, good point"

Did grand jury duty for a year and one of the crazier revelations was the tax fraud cases where people would just submit tax returns with made up numbers under other names, calculated to give a return of like $10-$100k. They were easily caught because it was linked to their bank account 🤦

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