Tax Evasion, Tax Cheats | featured news

Worried the Internal Revenue Service might target you for an audit? You probably should be if you own a small business in one of the wealthy suburbs of Los Angeles. You might also be wary if you're a small-business owner in one of dozens of communities near San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta or the District of Columbia.

The Internal Revenue Service has awarded an ex-banker $104 million for providing information about overseas tax cheats -- the largest amount ever awarded by the agency, lawyers for the whistleblower announced Tuesday.

Who are the biggest tax cheats in America? Single men under age 45. Sixty-four percent of people who admit to fudging their taxes were single men, and 55 percent were under 45, according to a recent survey by DDB Worldwide Communications Group. The good news: Only 15 percent of Americans admitted to cheating the tax man.

Wealthy tax evaders with assets stashed offshore can come clean with U.S. authorities under a new amnesty program letting them pay taxes with reduced penalties, the government said on Tuesday.

Can the same government that condemns Wikileaks for the disclosure of confidential information also accept information from that organization for the purpose of pursuing legal action? My assumption is “yes”. After all the government has used information from convicted felons to convict others. The government could also wait and let other media outlets, like Forbes, provide the names of the presumed guilty so that they can claim the information did not come directly from Wikileaks.