Perfectly Legal
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Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super-Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else (ISBN 1-59184-019-8) is a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston that argues that the American tax system has been tilted to supplement the incomes and extravagant lifestyles of the wealthy (which he dubs the "Political Donor Class").
Johnston argues the tax system squeezes the middle class, which creates a widening income gap that threatens the stability of the country. Workers are being cheated out of their retirement plans while failed CEOs walk away with hundreds of millions (the "golden parachute"). Some corporations avoid paying any federal income tax at all. The difference in taxable income (here zero) from GAAP income reported to financial analysts and SEC statements to investors has been called the book-tax gap in the tax policy literature by scholars, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the IRS. Corporate CEOs take vacations using corporate jets, while paying less money than ordinary people pay for a middle seat in coach seating and then sticking others with most of the bill. The working poor are seven times more likely to be audited by the IRS than anyone else. The book claims the IRS has become so weak that even when it was handed complete banking records detailing massive tax fraud by 1,600 people, only four percent were prosecuted.
