Wall Street Journal Quotes Carolyn Schenck on IRS Scaling Back Tax Enforcement

The Trump administration is scaling back tax enforcement, leaving fewer federal employees to audit returns, collect unpaid tax debts and deter Americans from skirting the law.

The Internal Revenue Service has shed thousands of enforcement workers since President Trump returned to office, and his fiscal 2027 budget proposal seeks further cuts amid the administration’s broader pullback of white-collar law enforcement. The IRS enforcement workforce would fall below 30,000, fewer than at the end of Trump’s first term and about a third less than the Biden-era peak.

The retrenchment is spurring a vibe shift across the tax landscape ahead of the April 15 deadline, and lawyers say they see more taxpayers and tax-shelter promoters eager to cut corners or cheat.

“There’s seemingly this mentality building which is, ‘The IRS isn’t going to catch me,’” said Carolyn Schenck, a former IRS national fraud counsel, now at law firm Caplin and Drysdale in Washington.

. . .

“The agency is trying to do at least some modicum of what they were doing before with catastrophically lower resources,” said Schenck, the former IRS fraud counsel.

For the full article, please visit The Wall Street Journal’s website.