The IRS Shrank. Will That Lead to More Tax Cheating?

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• 00:05

  Tomorrow, your taxes are due in the United States.

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  It's a task that most people generally hate but love to complain about online.

• 00:15

  Let me tell you something.

• 00:16

  I just paid my taxes today and never before in my life have I ever wanted to commit tax fraud as badly as I do right now.

• 00:24

  I went and paid my taxes today.

• 00:28

  I'm going to cry.

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  And the agency in charge of collecting these taxes, the Internal Revenue Service, isn't very popular either.

• 00:38

  Today, the IRS went into my bank account and took $700 from me.

• 00:45

  How do you actually do your taxes?

• 00:47

  The IRS literally will, like, they know exactly on the penny how much I made.

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  They can't send me a paper with just how much I owe.

• 00:59

  But taxes are important.

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  Your income taxes, along with all the other money the government collects, fund most of the federal budget.

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  These days, though, the IRS is pretty battered.

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  Fewer people doing tax enforcement now.

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  It's the very public shrinking of the IRS that we've seen over the past year.

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  That's our colleague Richard Rubin.

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  He covers tax policy for The Wall Street Journal.

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  We know that the IRS has fewer people, particularly on auditors,

• 01:31

  revenue agents, the people who do the civil tax enforcement.

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