ISTANBUL

The US Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced Friday they have recovered $1.3 billion unpaid taxes from high-income individuals.

The move is a result of an initiative that the IRS launched in February to pursue 125,000 high-income and high-wealth taxpayers who have not filed taxes since 2017, the Treasury Department said in a statement.

"In the first six months of this initiative, nearly 21,000 of these wealthy taxpayers have filed, leading to $172 million in taxes being paid," it said.

Another initiative the IRS launched in the fall of 2023, which concentrated on taxpayers with more than $1 million in income, the agency focused on around 1,600 additional high-wealth individuals.

"Nearly 80% of these 1,600 millionaires with delinquent tax debt have now made a payment, leading to over $1.1 billion recovered. This is an additional $100 million just since July, when Treasury and IRS announced reaching the $1 billion milestone," said the statement.

The IRS, in addition, said it has been modernizing its 65-year-old technology to improve taxpayer service and better secure taxpayer data.