Does Joe Biden owe up to $500,000 in back taxes? Republicans say non-partisan report indicates the president improperly avoided paying Medicare taxes before he took office
A non-partisan government report indicates that President Joe Biden could owe as much as $500,000 in back taxes to the IRS after it reported that he avoided paying for Medicare through a tax-code loophole for years.
Biden is pushing for a $3.5trillion bill to fund childcare, education and health care by targeting tax-fraud and increasing taxes on higher incomes so the ‘rich pay their fair share.’
A House Ways and Means Committee draft of the bill would end the tax-avoidance trick apparently used by Biden and boost audits done by the IRS.
However, the report drafted by the Congressional Research Service and obtained by the Dailymail.com, suggests Biden owes taxes under current rules, according to the congressman who requested the research institute to look into the allegations.
‘Joe Biden wants to raise taxes by $2.1trillion while claiming the rich need to pay their ‘fair share.’
But in 2017, multi-millionaire Joe Biden skirted his payroll taxes — the very taxes that fund Medicare and Obamacare,’ said Representative Jim Banks, of Indiana, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee.
‘According to the criteria CRS provided to my office, he owes the IRS and the American people hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes.
‘Every American should know about Joe Biden’s tax hypocrisy,’ Banks added.
Banks said the report shows Biden improperly used ‘S corporations’, the same tax loophole that the Obama administration tried and failed to close, to substantially lower his Medicare tax on speaking fees and book sales in 2017 and 2018.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden paid income taxes on those profits, but the strategy let the couple route more than $13million through S corporations and claim less than $800,000 of it as income eligible for the Medicare tax — avoiding the 3.8 percent self-employment tax they would have paid if they had compensated their income accurately, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The President isn’t specifically named in the CRP report but it does provide insight on the IRS winning cases against taxpayers who report suspiciously low salaries from S corporations and declare most of the income as ‘distributions’ immuned from the Medicare tax.
‘Courts have agreed with the IRS that shareholder-employees are subject to employment taxes when shareholders take distributions, dividends, or other forms of compensation in lieu of reasonable compensation,’ the report said.
The report lays out several examples, detailing a judgement involving an accountant named David Watson who excluded $200,000 annual income of his firm’s revenue through an S corporation while mentioning just $24,000 of it as salary that could be tax-deducted. The conclusion from several courts was that Watson had deliberately underpaid his taxes.
The CRS report also detailed that presidential tax returns are automatically audited only for the length of a four-year, presidential term.
However, the S corporations owned by Biden are inoperative this year, according to the White House, meaning the IRS won’t automatically run an audit on them.
Biden, who commonly names himself as ‘Middle Class Joe,’ has repeatedly argued that the rich must ‘pay their fair share.’
New York Congressman Chris Jacobs, who closely followed the issue, told the New York post that ‘Joe Biden wants to expand the IRS’s funding and authority, so they can audit more Americans.’
‘Given that the liberal Tax Policy Center and the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service both have raised questions about the way Biden handled his taxes, why doesn’t he ask for his own taxes to get audited first?’