IRS criminal referrals against big corporations and ultrawealthy plummeted during Trump’s first year
Dodging taxes got less risky for the ultrarich and corporations after Donald Trump returned to the White House last year.
During the new administration’s first year
, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has referred at most two cases of possible tax evasion by ultrawealthy people or large businesses to its criminal investigators, a sharp drop from previous years, according to new data obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.The steep decline underscores the administration’s dramatic reversal of a Biden-era effort to step up the IRS scrutiny of big companies and wealthy individuals.
“When the IRS budget and staff is cut, your taxes don’t go down. Instead, those that choose not to play by the rules shift the burden of funding our government to those that do,” said Danny Werfel, the IRS’s commissioner from 2023 to 2025 after reviewing the data. “The apparent sharp reduction in the inventory of IRS criminal fraud referrals is a textbook example of that.”
Early last year, IRS agents assigned to billionaire audits told ICIJ that their cases ground to a halt when their teams were decimated and budgets frozen under the rapid cost-cutting effort led by billionaire Elon Musk. The new referral numbers are among the first enforcement data the agency’s Large Business and International Division, which is tasked with auditing big businesses and billionaires, has reported during Trump’s second term.
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