Eliminating our accounts payable department?
Billions in Taxes Go Unpaid. Under Trump, the I.R.S. Won't Say How Much.
Source: The New York Times
Billions in Taxes Go Unpaid. Under Trump, the I.R.S. Won’t Say How Much.
The absence of the annual estimate on the tax gap could make it more difficult to assess whether more taxes are going unpaid since President Trump took office.
The holding up of the tax gap estimate comes as President Trump’s administration has pushed out roughly a quarter of the I.R.S. work force and cut the agency’s budget, weakening its ability to conduct audits. Aaron Schwartz for The New York Times
By Andrew Duehren
https://www.nytimes.com/by/andrew-duehren
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy and the I.R.S.
Sept. 16, 2026, 11:42 a.m. ET
The Trump administration has held up the publication of an annual Internal Revenue Service estimate of unpaid taxes, a delay that could mask the fiscal cost of the steep decline in the agency’s ability to audit the rich. … The I.R.S. has long published an estimate of the tax gap, the amount of tax owed under existing law that goes uncollected each year. The agency began releasing an estimate of the tax gap annually during the Biden administration, but under President Trump, it has yet put out an update. The current leader of the I.R.S., Frank Bisignano, has cast doubt on the metric and indicated he wants to focus instead on what he called the “addressable tax gap.”
The shift comes after the Trump administration pushed out roughly a quarter of the I.R.S. work force and cut the agency’s budget, weakening the government’s ability to conduct time-intensive audits. An inspector general report last month found that revenue collected from audits dropped by more than a third last fiscal year, a sign that the tax gap could be growing under Mr. Trump. … In its most recent projection, released in October 2024, the I.R.S. estimated that roughly $700 billion in owed taxes went uncollected in 2022, though the agency said it expected that roughly $90 billion of that would eventually be paid. The next estimate, for 2023, was scheduled for publication last fall, but has not been released.
The absence of an updated tax gap estimate is part of a pattern across the Trump administration, which has either stopped collecting or sought to change the measurement of federal data that scientists and other researchers have long relied on for a rigorous, unvarnished understanding of the country. The Pentagon declined to provide information to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office about the cost of the war in Iran, and last year the president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the monthly job numbers, baselessly calling the labor market data “rigged.”
An I.R.S. spokesman said the agency was updating the methodologies used to calculate the tax gap and would release the figure when it was ready. Mr. Bisignano, in a statement, said revenue from tax enforcement was increasing this year and did not depend on the number of auditors.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/business/trump-irs-tax-gap.html
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