United States
Further information: Tax evasion in the United States| Year | Revenue lost (US$ billion) |
|
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 305 | |
| 2009 | 304 | |
| 2008 | 357 | |
| 2007 | 376 | |
| 2006 | 350 | |
| 2005 | 314 | |
| 2004 | 272 | |
| 2003 | 257 | |
| 2002 | 269 | |
| 2001 | 290 | |
| Total revenue lost: | $3.09 trillion | |
In the United States, tax evasion is the purposeful, illegal attempt to evade the assessment or the payment of a tax imposed by federal law. Conviction of tax evasion may result in fines and imprisonment.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has identified small businesses and sole proprietors as the largest contributors to the tax gap between what Americans owe in federal taxes and what the federal government receives. Small businesses and sole proprietorships contribute to the tax gap because there are few ways for the government to know about skimming or non-reporting of income without mounting significant investigations.
The typical tax evader in the United States is a male under the age of 50 in the highest tax bracket and with a complicated tax return. The most common means of tax evasion is overstatement of charitable contributions, particularly church donations.
Read more about this topic: Tax Evasion
Famous quotes related to united states:
“Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
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—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
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—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)