The guidance and ruling being announced Monday includes plans to essentially stop “partnership basis shifting."
The IRS plans to end a major tax loophole for wealthy taxpayers that could raise more than $50 billion in revenue over the next decade, the U.S. Treasury Department says.
The guidance and ruling being announced Monday includes plans to essentially stop “partnership basis shifting” — a process by which a business or person can move assets among a series of related parties to avoid paying taxes.
Biden administration officials said after evaluating the practice that there are no economic grounds for these transactions, with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo calling it “really just a shell game.” The officials said the additional IRS funding provided through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had enabled increased oversight and greater awareness of the practice.
“These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe,” IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said.
The officials said the additional IRS funding provided through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had enabled increased oversight and greater awareness of the practice.
If you're for the government being fiscally responsible (rather than pretending that macroeconomic systems are identical to household budgets) you want rule changes like the one mentioned in the headline as well as more funding for auditing and other enforcement of existing IRS rules.
The IRS processed 162 million tax returns in FY 2023. If they raise $50 billion, then that means $308 for every taxpayer in America, courtesy of the IRS.
Honest taxpayers rejoice. Tax cheats, go cry about it.
Really it has no impact on most of us. I have never used a partnership tax basis shift and almost certainly never would have. It is going to cost a bunch of obscenely wealthy jerks some money and cost the rest of us nothing. Win-win.
Taking money that would otherwise just be passed back and forth between billionaires and hectomillionaires hurts nobody.
Investing that money in any of the thousands of critically underfunded parts of the government (education, infrastructure including Internet, antipoverty programs, and public defenders being some of the most important ones) could be absolutely TRANSFORMATIVE, especially for those most in need and/or most abused by the current status quo.
They take my money too and I'm OK with it so if they get to take money from people who make 2000 times more money then me and don't pay their share I will cheer it on.
They are using far more of the courts, currency, and infrastructure than we are. They are getting police protection of their property instead of having their pets murdered. They are getting massive government handouts that we are not.
I'm not sure. I'm not a wordsmith or an economist. But I would expect it to be something that conveys a sense that the money is being decommissioned rather than mobilized, or annihilated rather than gathered.
But the sense of deactivation or destruction is usually a negative feeling, so I would want to find a word that puts a slight positive spin on it. This is a happy conclusion to the money's journey. Its task is done and the inflationary pressure associated with its work is now relieved.
Could you also please allow those of us overseas to use silly things like retirement accounts without having it all be considered PFICs? I just wanna contribute to my current country's equivalent of an ISA/401K type of thing.