Circumvention and delay---the IRS is nuked AND audits take 3 years.

The Biden administration on Wednesday blamed a staffing shortage at the Internal Revenue Service for enabling the wealthiest 1% of Americans to shirk $163 billion in tax bills annually, pointing to the finding to support its plan for dramatically increasing resources for the tax agency.

More than one-quarter of unpaid taxes comes from just the top 1% of earners in the United States, according to a new report from the Treasury Department, with more than 20% stemming from the top 0.5%. The IRS is picking its battles, Treasury said, creating a separate tax system for low-income Americans and the wealthy who can afford to hire professionals to help them take advantage of IRS' shortcomings.

“Currently, an under-staffed IRS, with outdated technology, is unable to collect 15% of taxes that are owed, and a lack of resources means that audit rates have fallen across the board, but they’ve decreased more in the last decade for high earners than for Earned Income Tax Credit recipients,” said Natasha Sarin, Treasury's deputy assistant secretary for economic policy and author of the report.

To fully and fairly enforce the tax code, Sarin said, the IRS needs to "hire and train revenue agents who can decipher their thousands of pages of sophisticated tax filings." President Biden has called for an $80 billion injection into the IRS over the next decade, saying it would bring in $700 billion in revenue.

The Congressional Budget Office, however, said last week that the White House was painting too rosy a picture. CBO projected the government would bring in just $200 billion in new revenues over a decade, though it said new information reporting requirements and some tax code changes could produce a higher number. The office predicted that taxpayers would find new ways of evading their tax bills and said outdated technology could hamper the productivity of IRS employees. Hiring surges would help, CBO said, but the average audit takes 30 months to complete and employees can require extensive training. IRS management has said it is targeting mid-career and highly skilled employees for its new staff, but CBO cautioned it may not be able to hire "its desired mix of candidates." CBO also suggested employee turnover could be higher than IRS is predicting.