In June 2021, ProPublica posted what it claimed were tax returns of the twenty-five richest filers stolen from the IRS. It used the revelation of stolen returns to claim that the wealthiest twenty-five people only paid 3.4 percent of their incomes in income taxes in recent years.17 That claim was contrary to the actual stolen tax returns themselves and is inconsistent with the publicly available IRS data showing that the top four hundred income earners paid on average 32 percent of their income in federal income and payroll taxes.
