GAO Reports Offshore Tax Evasion Is On The Increase

by Leroy Baker, Tax-News.com, New York

22 December 2003

A report by the General Accounting Office released last Friday has suggested the Internal Revenue Service is not devoting enough resources to its fight against offshore tax evasion.

According to the GAO’s report, the White House was recently informed by the IRS that over 400,000 taxpayers have been linked to tax evasion schemes, and it noted that this is a substantially higher figure than the 131,000 the agency reported to Congress earlier in the fall.

Though the IRS has boosted the number of staff in the small-business and self-employment division four-fold to over 1,000 in the 2002/2003 fiscal year, the agency still came up short due to “overly optimistic workload forecasts”, the GAO states.

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