By Pedro Bianco
En esta noticia
The IRS has launched an offensive aimed at a very specific group: high-income people who, despite making a lot of money, failed to file their tax returns.
The agency is handling more than 125,000 taxpayers who earn more than $400,000 a year and did not file for years, case by case.
IRS investigates, one by one, people who earned more than US$400,000 and did not file tax returns
The initiative was launched in February 2024 and targets so-called high-income “nonfilers”: taxpayers who earn $400,000 or more a year and still did not file their tax returns in one or more of the tax years from 2017 to 2021.
In total, the IRS identified more than 125,000 of these cases. These are not minor mistakes or matters of interpretation, but people with very high incomes who simply did not meet their filing obligation.
How they are detected
The key is that the IRS already knows how much they earned. The agency identified them thanks to information sent by third parties -- employers, banks and other payers -- through forms such as the W-2 and 1099s, which show income above $400,000.
In other words, the IRS has a record of that income even if the person never filed a return; the failure to file, in the face of that data, is what raises the alarm.
Where the investigations stand now
According to the latest available data, the situation is one of reactivation. After the delays that were detected, the IRS began moving forward again in early 2026 on high-priority cases that had stalled, and the backlog of cases waiting to be assigned for collection had been shrinking by late 2025.
Even so, in the latest measurement, a very large share of the cases still had not been resolved, with no return filed and no tax assessed, so most of the work remains unfinished.
At the same time, the IRS says it is expanding its pursuit of nonfilers, relying increasingly on data analysis, automation and artificial intelligence to select and prioritize cases.