Charles O. Rossotti is a Republican businessman who was commissioner of the IRS for five years during the last part of the Clinton Administration and the first part of the Bush Administration. In this recent PBS interview , Rossotti told Bill Moyers that we are paying about 15% too much in taxes due to illegal tax cheats. According to Rossotti, roughly $250-300 billion a year is owed but not being paid. “Which basically means everybody is paying 15 percent more,” says Mr. Rossotti. “You could give everybody twice as big a refund, if they average it out, if you just collected all the taxes that are due.” Mr. Rossetti says that the the biggest single amount of unpaid taxes is attributable to abusive tax shelters promoted by the very people we trust to keep the system honest — accounting firms and law firms.
I think it’s safe to say that Mr. Rossotti will not be on the KPMG expert witness defense team in the investigation noted earlier here.