The US was practically founded on principle of refusal to pay unfair taxes. As the article suggests some are just filing incorrectly, what are the real risks and consequences of this?
Unfair because of lack of legislative representation. One can get into a debate over gerrymandering and whatnot, but American voters most certainly aren't an overseas colony under an unelected king/queen anymore. There is non-rebellion recourse available to citizens if they don't like a tax.
The newborn country (including President Washington himself at the head of the army) very rapidly demonstrated it wouldn't accept "we don't like the tax" as an argument from represented citizens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
What exactly is a fair tax?
I'd very much like to see government downsize, but if you want to pay taxes at the level at which the country was founded, you also have to restrict government activity to that level.
Not sure if that is tenable.
The US is the textbook experiment which proves that even minarchy (a minimal government) can't work.
All form of governments, no matter how small, tend to grow into huge socialist monsters (the usa is the largest employer in the world, second only to China, maybe).
Even if that very first government was founded on not collecting very little taxes for this very reason.
The USA have 330 million citizens and 10 million people without valid residency, in total something around 340 million citizens. The public sector clocks in at 15%, which includes the military and USPS. That is, seriously, not much.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/public-servi...
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
Well, say you work at a company with 100 developers. That's who's making the stuff. Everybody else is there to make sure the stuff gets made. There's a manager for every 6-8 developers (13-17), and there's a couple managers for those managers. Add in HR and you're already up to about a 25% overhead and we haven't talked about equipment and buildings and customer management and advertising and litigation and taxes and so on and so forth.
Provided you never used an R&D tax credit, none.
But if you did, with a huge templated report report about software R&D, you have a verbatim provable record of doing R&D expenses. And those reports, they come from 10 different vendors who all use the same words and formatting. The IRS could easily solve one case and get everyone.