There are costs that come with living in a modern state, like investing in roads, first responders, or water infrastructure. To pay for those costs we have taxes. We can and should argue about whether those taxes are too high, or who should pay more or less, but there’s one thing we can all agree on: When large, powerful corporations and wealthy individuals cheat the system and don’t pay their taxes, honest businesses are disadvantaged, and the rest of us are forced to pick up the tab.
Unfortunately, existing state laws allow some of the biggest, richest out-of-state tax cheats to get away scot-free. And because of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s veto pen, they’ll continue to do so, leaving regular New Yorkers holding the bag.
The problem rests with a bizarre loophole in New York’s tax whistleblower law, the False Claims Act. The law was the first of its kind anywhere to only target tax enforcement against large corporations and wealthy taxpayers, when they knowingly file a false tax return to avoid paying over $350,000 in taxes.
Since 2010, New York has recouped over $585 million from these big-money tax dodgers, including $330 million from Sprint-Nextel in what was the largest sales tax fraud in American history. That’s over half a billion dollars that regular New Yorkers would have had to make up for in their own taxes.
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