[DanielHB]

Didn't the US have a whistleblower bounty with the IRS? I heard it was one of the most successful programs they ever ran. Whistleblow on your company's tax evasion and you get paid a pretty good chunk of money from the IRS. IRS collects its due and you get paid proportional to the amount of tax revenue evaded (I remember a few cases where the whistleblower got tens of millions of dollars).

It is kind of bizarre, but the incentives are perfectly aligned, if the tax evasion sum is low you get paid less therefor it is not worth whistleblowing. The IRS doesn't want to catch the small fries, to some extent tax evasion is desired for smaller companies.

[thfuran]

>The IRS doesn't want to catch the small fries, to some extent tax evasion is desired for smaller companies.

What?

[jabroni_salad]

That does come across weirdly but the IRS is a perennial favorite defund target so they don't have the resources to go after everyone, they should only choose juicier cases in that respect.

There are some good points in this article (the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero) that can be extrapolated to other parts of the financial world. The highest level point is that sometimes, a little slippage is needed for business to get done, and getting business done is the main goal of the economy.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

[thfuran]

Not having the means to catch every fraudster is very different from wanting them to commit the fraud. I think the only sense in which the IRS wants tax fraud is that some portion of its bureaucracy is dedicated to handling fraud and many of the people so employed would prefer continued employment to magically eliminating all fraud.

[DanielHB]

You got to the root of what I was saying, making sure mom and pop store at the corner street is paying all due taxes it not worth chasing and might in fact be net-negative to the economy