It's a sad commentary on contemporary American politics that there's something controversial about taking actions to ensure people and corporations actually pay the taxes they legally owe, but that's apparently where we are in this country. As part of the financing for the much-negotiated bipartisan infrastructure bill, Democrats had proposed boosting the budget of the Internal Revenue Service, the better to allow the federal government's principal tax-collection agency to increase its audits and otherwise beef up its technological capacity to detect tax evasion. However, that led to significant opposition from Republican senators and so was dropped from the package. That's a shame. Agreeing on the levying of new taxes is always a matter fraught with controversy, but insisting that people should pay what they owe under existing law shouldn't be a matter of partisan disagreement. Make no mistake, this is not peanuts we are talking about, but hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Credible estimates put the figure in the neighborhood of $600 billion to $630 billion for 2020, or about 15 percent of total taxes owed. In a 2019 paper, then-University of Pennsylvania law school professor Natasha Sarin, now a deputy assistant secretary at Treasury, and former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, estimated that some $7.5 trillion in owed taxes will not be paid between 2019 and 2029. Lest that seem high, the Treasury Department itself projects that the 10-year tax gap will grow to $7 trillion. No one believes it's possible to collect all, or even most, of that owed-but-unpaid amount. Not with the myriad ways available to corporations and the very wealthy to evade their tax obligations. But if the federal government could collect just the 15 percent of that gap that Sarin and Summers believe it is possible to capture, it could give the federal government another $1.1 trillion — and at a time of yawning deficits. According to a primer on the tax gap by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the bipartisan fiscal-policy organization, "By far the biggest contributor to tax gap is underreporting, or when an individual or business files a tax return that incorrectly underreports the taxes it owes in a given year."