Newswire:

President Bush + Big Business = BFF

If you’re like us, you spent last weekend hunched over your kitchen table attempting to work out the intricacies of the American tax system (oh, and happy tax day, btw). That is, unless, you’re a large U.S. corporation. [USA Today]

See, big business has been getting off the hook more and more lately. USA Today reports: “The IRS audit rate for the nation’s large corporations last year dropped to 26 percent, down from a high of 72 percent in 1990 and the lowest level in two decades.”

And that’s not all: “The time the IRS spent on each large corporation also dropped by 20 percent over the last five years, according to the analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research organization at Syracuse University.”

The richer you are the better. Since 2002, there’s been a 33 percent decease in the number of in-depth investigations large firms with assets of $250 million or more.

Meanwhile, small businesses are feeling the heat. IRS increased audit rates of small and mid-sized corporations. How’s that for helping out the little guy?

The ironic part of all this? The little guy is usually the one who pays his taxes. A separate USA Today story shows how “hundreds of seemingly wealthy people — company presidents, former soap opera stars, top-selling real estate agents — live in multimillion-dollar homes yet have huge tax problems.”

In fact, “the IRS estimates that 21 percent of federal individual income taxes go unpaid each year — about $300 billion last year.” [USA Today]

Check out our list of other Big Bad Guys that the White House has failed to investigate here. We’d be rich too if we could dodge taxes.

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Comments
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1. You, sir, are an idiot. Go ahead and vote for your millionaire Democrat, so they can “feel your pain”.

   — ken - Apr 14, 08:10 PM - #