Column: Who are the biggest tax cheats? The 1% — and here’s how they get away with it

The top 0.1% have been increasing their share of the economy for four decades; everyone else is losing out. Of the unreported income, about 6 percentage points is hidden by “sophisticated evasion that goes undetected in random audits.” The unreported income for the 1%, households with more than about $420,000 in annual income, is as much as one-third higher than previously estimated, the authors wrote. The problem is that some forms of sophisticated evasion are “effectively invisible in random audits.” That’s because much of the unreported income is hidden in foreign accounts or in “pass-through” businesses. Therefore, “while the income of taxpayers in the bottom 99% of the income distribution is comprehensively examined,” they write, “up to 35% of the income earned at the top is not.” The study doesn’t come at a good moment for the super-rich. Biden shares Warren’s view that “middle-class families are paying more than their fair share and those at the top are not doing their part,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on March 15. corporations could be paying higher taxes.” Pressure on Congress to give the IRS more resources to unearth hidden income among the wealthy is also intensifying.