Depending on the jobs he had and if they took deductions, he probably doesn't owe that much - might have even gotten a refund some years? Even without deductions, the jobs listed "odd jobs" and bartending - a lot of his income was probably not reported.<p>The standard deduction is a lot for some people.
I skipped paying mine for a year, when I was younger. I had done an early withdrawal on a 401K to finance a vacation to Europe, and I knew I owed, but I didn't have any money and I didn't want to deal with it, so I just didn't. Nobody ever bothered me about it. I squared up with the IRS the year after and they put me on a payment plan, no trouble.
This is how it should work. If you only have wages/salary as income, the government already knows how you much you earn, how much tax you paid, and how much you should pay, unless your employer paid you off the books.<p>IRS should just send you a letter stating those three things, and allow you to respond with yes, I agree, or no, this is not right.
Occasionally I'll hear some leader in a suit say that the US has a voluntary tax system, or that voluntary taxpayer compliance is a foundational principle of the US tax system, and that always sounds like a sick joke.<p>But here's this guy who just doesn't file, and nothing bad happens?<p>And now I see the IRS has a brand new program to start sending letters to tens of thousands of people with more than a million in income who never file at all [0].<p>They're just starting this now?<p>I feel like such a chump.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-launches-new-effort-aimed-at-high-income-non-filers-125000-cases-focused-on-high-earners-including-millionaires-who-failed-to-file-tax-returns-with-financial-activity-topping-100-billion" rel="nofollow">https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-launches-new-effort-aimed-a...</a>
Here’s the thing. If you are poor — making a low income — it doesn’t really mater. Even if you owe them some money you’re too insignificant for the IRS to worry about. More likely they owe you refund money and it will just sit there and even collect a wee bit of interest until you decide to square things.
I know a couple guys, both engineers, who stopped filing for 5 years simply because they didn't want to bother with the paperwork. Eventually they got some sort of warning letters and caught up. 10 years surprises me, especially with the 9 dependents.
What is the purpose of this article? Is it to highlight that the IRS needs funding? Or is it to encourage people to not pay their taxes?<p>It's weird to me that people don't see paying taxes as a social obligation to support the country that a lot of people claim to love. Me, I have some major hesitations about this country, but I still at least due the bare minimum to support it because it often means that my tax dollars can support others.<p>I'm pretty convinced that tax day exists just so that political actors have a target to demonize the day the gov't comes and "takes your money." When in fact, the people who benefit the most from our tax structure (the wealthy) don't actually pay their share. But I think it's playing right into their hands to demonize this day. If you really want to stick it to Elon and Bezos, I think you have to pay your taxes to the best of your ability, and make the IRS' job easier so they have more time to get the money they're owed from the wealthy holdouts.<p>But I know I'm in the minority on this one.
Republican's gutted the IRS. They have no personell for low level audits of indiviuals. They still rely on mainframes running COBOL programs from 60 years ago. It does them negative good to go after people who owe less than it costs to keep the lights on in the office.
The article is good but it does sound like this guy had some witholdings (aka paid taxes) and has skirted consequences by lying to the IRS. Probably not a great idea but if you didn't make a lot of money its unlikely the IRS would've gone after you anyways.
The tax code is an iron rod of oppression. I call on the readers of this site, who are collectively capable of implementing a system that is coherent, to rise up and insist that the operating system of the country suck less. Much, much less.