Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks and his famous reply was ““I rob banks because that’s where the money is.”
We’ve just witnessed an investigation of multi-millionaire Paul Manafort and multi-millionaire Michael Cohen and both men are going to be in jail for a very long time and pay hefty fines because of the laws that they broke many years ago.
Honore de Balzac once said “Behind every great fortune there is a crime”.
My question is this: Manafort and Cohen would be free men if not for entanglements with the investigation of Trump. Presumably, they would have lived out their lives in peace and prosperity had it not been for this unfortunate association with Mr. Trump.
How many Manaforts and Cohens are there out there and why are we, the American people and our justice department, not looking into the financial affairs of more multi-millionaires?
It sounds as though your proposing that federal government pay special attention to the very wealthy. If that’s the case, perhaps you can say more about the threshold you would apply and what you mean by “looking into”.
I’m good with, for example, funding the IRS to provide special attention to the very wealthy. I’m not sure I see how the Justice Department gets involved until there’s at least evidence of a crime.
I think that even the very wealthy deserve the presumption of innocence from the government.
The IRS has a few guidelines for who gets audited. While I agree that everyone deserves the presumption of innocence, in the case of the IRS, for example, certain patterns get investigated and certain patterns do not. We simply have to alter the patterns they are looking for.
I think there is a deeper secret here, one that many politicians don’t want to talk about. Donald Trump bragged about how easy it was for him to buy a politician. He was a large donor to many Democrats in the past.
If politicians depend on big money to fund their campaigns, even the slightest hint that that are suspicious of big money, in the altering of criteria used by the IRS to trigger and audit, they might be biting the hands that feed them.
I like the idea of identifying patterns that trigger further IRS investigation. It sounds as though you agree that further Justice Department attention follows from the results of such IRS audits when appropriate circumstances merit.
I don’t think the ties between big-money donors and politicians is any “deeper secret”. It’s been the explicit law of the land since Citizens United. As I understand it, the current standard is to require evidence a quid pro quo before pursuing any criminal action against such a donor.
I like the approach of, instead, conducting specific IRS investigations of taxpayers who make extreme use of those provisions.
While maybe not a secret, it’s not talked about much by front runners of campaigns. That’s what I like about Elizabeth Warren’s campaign promise. Yes, that’s only during the primary, but it would strengthen the party if all those running took the same pledge.
A friend of mine, many years ago, told me of his work for the IRS. He was an accountant by trade. His specialty was to look for certain patterns on tax forms. If you owned a coin op cleaner or a miniature golf facility and vacationed in the Grand Cayman Islands over the winter…..you were on a list to be audited.
There is a laundry list (no pun intended) of behaviors by the wealthy that I would like to put on that audit suspicion list.
Agreed.
I think the primary effect of Ms. Warren’s decision will be to ensure that she doesn’t win the nomination or the general election. I’m not sad about that, because I agree with you that the issue ought to be front and center.
My understanding is that the IRS has always been extremely tight-lipped about the patterns it uses to choose returns for auditing. Among other reasons, one of the better ones is that such discretion makes it much more difficult for tax cheats to game the system.
I agree with you that the very wealthy often do things that should tip off the IRS. Perhaps the new Congress can make the IRS be more aggressive — starting with properly funding it.
“How many Manaforts and Cohens are there out there and why are we, the American people and our justice department, not looking into the financial affairs of more multi-millionaires?”
Well, for an estimate, read the Panama Papers. You know, that encyclopedia of tax dodging which has resulted in more murders of journalists than criminal convictions.