Does anyone have a citation for this?

I expected this was a big reason for the seemingly illogical behavior, but am curious how it shakes out. Where does money they recover go?

It would seem to make sense to seed a high income investigative unit, checked by the courts, and then allow them to retain a substantial portion of their recoveries to self-fund.

IRS is funded out of the general fund by Congress, which is also where the money the IRS finds goes.

> It would seem to make sense to seed a high income investigative unit, checked by the courts, and then allow them to retain a substantial portion of their recoveries to self-fund.

For an example of how this could go horribly, horribly wrong, look at police use of civil forfeiture. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/police-abused-civil-fo...

>> checked by the courts

If you limited their targets to high net worth individuals, I daresay they'd be able to afford a robust (and as fair as we can make it) defense.

Unlike the abuses in civil forfeiture, where the primary targets tend to be without legal recourse.

Limiting scope sounds nice in theory but there is always scope creep when you throw greed into the equation. And generally speaking the courts are not designed to be a fast resolution to anything.

That's why you build a system of adversarial justice: enforcement vs defense. Same as we feel is good enough to use elsewhere.

And a fast resolution doesn't seem required in this case. High net worth individuals don't seem like they'd be impacted by {potential tax bill and penalties} of their assets being frozen for multiple years while a case plays out. Relative to their total assets, any tax bill is going to be manageable.

The only problems actually preventing the IRS from conducting this enforcement are (1) political cover from direct Congressional interference & (2) lack of resources due to general defunding by Congress.

Given a choice between the dangers of establishing a self-funding high net worth tax prosecution arm and not prosecuting those individuals, I feel the greater risk to democracy is the later.

> https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040v.pdf

"Make your check or money order payable to “United States Treasury.” "

That's, you know, the federal government. Not the department called the IRS. The IRS gets a budgeted amount of funds.