IRS Spent Nearly $400 Million for Scant Progress in Collecting Overseas Taxes

The Internal Revenue Service, tasked with implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act with no new funds, spent $380 million on a roadmap for documenting overseas assets but made little progress, a watchdog found. The tax agency “has taken limited or no action on a majority of the planned activities outlined in the FATCA Compliance Roadmap,” said the report dated July 5 from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The agency’s efforts to match reports of U.S. taxpayer assets with foreign financial institutions against individual taxpayers’ data linked to identification numbers “were unsuccessful, which affected the IRS’s ability to identify and enforce FATCA requirements for individual taxpayers,” the report said.