That realization sits behind my series of #noir novels about the two-fisted forensic accountant #MartinHench, which started with last April's #RedTeamBlues and continues with #TheBezzle, this coming February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

A typical noir hero is an unlicensed cop, who goes places the cops can't go and asks questions the cops can't ask.

2/

The noir part comes at the end, when the hero is forced to admit that he's being going places the cops didn't *want* to go and asking questions the cops didn't *want* to ask. Marty Hench is a noir hero, but he's not an unlicensed cop, he's an unlicensed IRS inspector, and like other noir heroes, his capers keep resulting in his realization that the questions and places the IRS won't investigate are down to their *choice* not to investigate, not an inability to investigate.

3/

The IRS Files are a testimony to this proposition: that #LeonaHemsley wasn't wrong when she said, "Taxes are for the little people." Helmsley's crime wasn't believing that proposition - it was stating it aloud, repeatedly, to the press. The tax-avoidance strategies revealed in the IRS Files are *obviously* tax evasion, and the IRS simply let it slide.

4/

Instead, they focused their auditing firepower on working people who couldn't afford to defend themselves, looking for minor compliance errors committed by people receiving public benefits.

Or at least, that's how it *used* to be. But the Biden administration poured billions into the IRS, greenlighting 30,000 new employees whose mission would be to investigate the kinds of 0.1%ers and giant multinational corporations who'd Helmsleyed their way into tax-free fortunes.

5/

The fact that these elite monsters paid no tax was hardly a secret, and the impunity with which they functioned was a constant, corrosive force that delegitimized American society as a place where the rules only applied to everyday people and not the rich and powerful who preyed on them.

6/