Whitehouse urges passage of Stop CHEATERS Act and other legislation to fix corrupt tax code
Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) joined Senators Angus King (I-ME), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Tim Kaine (D-VA) in introducing new legislation to provide the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) the resources it needs to crack down on wealthy tax cheats and provide the services taxpayers deserve. Whitehouse also urged passage of legislation to make the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share of taxes.
“The combination of Republicans’ decimation of the IRS enforcement function and their Beautiful-for-Billionaires Law has made Tax Day a field day for wealthy tax cheats and a tough day for many hardworking families,” said Whitehouse. “Our bill would restore the funding the agency needs to enforce the law on the ultra-rich – who can afford armies of accountants to obscure cheating – while delivering the refund checks middle-class families wait all year for. We need to push smart legislation to de-corrupt the tax code and put an end to this billionaire freeloading.”
Republicans decimated the IRS budget for over a decade beginning in 2010, leading to audit rates for the very wealthy and large corporations plummeting, everyone else making up an increasing share of the audits, and as much as 91 percent of taxpayer calls going unanswered. The Inflation Reduction Act provided funding to reverse this decline but Republicans have clawed much of it back and the Trump Administration has cut 25 percent of the IRS workforce.
The Stop Corporations and High Earners from Avoiding Taxes and Enforce the Rules Strictly, or the Stop CHEATERS Act, would provide the IRS the funding it needs to get it back on track with the spending plan proposed during the final year of the Biden Administration. The return on investment for auditing the wealthy is as much as $12 for every dollar spent. The Budget Lab at Yale has found that the Stop CHEATERS Act would reduce the deficit by $997.6 billion.
Whitehouse continues to push legislation to make our tax code fairer. At a time when the top one percent accounts for a larger share of income than the bottom 50 percent, Republicans cut taxes for the top one percent by over $1 trillion in last year’s Big, Beautiful-for-Billionaires Law. For the bottom 70 percent of earners, the combination of 2025 tariff increases and the Republican tax law will reduce after-tax-and-transfer incomes on average. The Republican law also cut corporate taxes by more than $900 billion at a time when the share of federal revenue contributed by corporations has shrunk to under 10 percent in recent years, and many giant profitable corporations pay nothing in federal income taxes.
Whitehouse has introduced several pieces of legislation to address the inequities in our tax code and make the wealthy and corporations pay a fairer share. His Paying a Fair Share Act would codify the “Buffett Rule,” requiring those with incomes above $1 million pay at least a 30 percent effective tax rate to ensure the ultra-wealthy can’t pay lower income tax rates than teachers and firefighters. To extend the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, Whitehouse introduced the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act, which would require taxpayers earning more than $400,000 to contribute a fairer share to the programs. Last year, he also introduced the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, which would require multinational corporations to pay the same tax rate on profits earned abroad as they do in the U.S., as well as the Stop Subsidizing Giant Mergers Act this year, which would end tax-free mergers involving large companies that provide taxpayer subsidies for acquisitions that consolidate corporate power.
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