Trump's Xmas present to his oligarch friends
Brad Reed for Common Dreams
A Tuesday report from Reuters found that
federal tax prosecutions in 2025 fell to “their lowest level in decades this
year,” falling by 27% over the last year.
The report noted that the Trump
administration has made “deep cuts to the Internal Revenue Service’s
criminal investigative unit,” and has also reassigned some agents who worked in
the unit to focus more on immigration cases.
The Trump administration has even assigned more than 20 IRS
agents in the agency’s DC office to conduct patrols alongside city police
officers as part of the president’s purported plan to reduce crime in the
capital city, Reuters reported.
Reuters also observed that the US Department
of Justice closed its Tax Division, and that “a third or more of the
criminal lawyers who worked there quit.”
Sources told Reuters that the Trump
administration explicitly told DOJ prosecutors earlier this year that tax
prosecutions were not a top priority, and one source said that DOJ leadership
under the second Trump administration was “very skeptical about white-collar
crime and whether we should be doing those cases.”
The report added that US attorneys’ offices at the moment are unlikely to pick up the slack for enforcing tax laws given that DOJ records show “more than 1,000 lawyers have left US attorneys’ offices this year, roughly double the number who quit or were pushed out in previous years.”
David Hubbert, a senior fellow at the Tax Law Center at New
York University’s law school, told Reuters that these cuts
would likely result in a surge in tax cheating.
“Decreasing criminal enforcement across all types of
taxpayers would signal an indifference to cheating and insults the millions of
honest filers who pay the taxes they owe,” Hubbert explained.
