Tax Collectors Snoop With The Rich Moving To Low Tax Havens With Advanced Tools

There has been quite a chasing game between tax collectors of US and rich citizens of New York moving down to Florida. The game has in fact become quite high tech and has gone to extremities. Latest federal laws have put strict limits to deduce all sorts of state or local income taxes. And this has all the more encouraged rich New Yorkers to go to Florida and other states with lower tax facilities. Government man of New York, Andrew Cuomo has said that this sudden movement of rich folk away from the city has lead to shortage of $2.3 billion revenue during December and January. The government constantly asked for taxing the rich people and when it was finally done, they left.

However, New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has intervened in between. They have been trying to get the taxes paid before people are leaving. New York has made approximately 3000 nonresidency audits in a year between the periods of 2010 to 2017. The total amount collected was $1 billion. Above 50% of the people who had been audited were terribly defeated in their cases. The average amount gathered by New York State between the periods of 2015 to 2017 for each audit was $144,270. Besides using old techniques of keeping checks on taxpayers like going through their bills on credit card, travel routines etc, New York has been using high-tech devices like getting into social media accounts, cellphone, vet or doctor visits etc. Auditors have also been paying in person visit to taxpayers’ houses and peeking inside the refrigerators.

Barry Horowitz from an accounting company named WithumSmith+Brown mentioned that in case someone earns quite high in New York and they have flown to Florida, there is high probability for their residency audit to be 100%.