Iowa Senator Charles Grassley has proposed a new way of cracking down on the sex trade. Some are calling it the “pimp tax.” Grassley and other members of his Senate Finance Committee have endorsed a bill that sets up a new division in the Internal Revenue Service to go after pimps who fail to pay taxes on their profits from “employees” who get paid for sex.
Grassley says there are “business people” in the “underworld of sex enslavement” who are making a buck and the I-R-S could help put them out of business. “Law enforcement people worked for decades to get Al Capone and couldn’t get anything on him,” Grassley says. “The only thing that sent him to prison was the IRS going after him.” Under current law, the I-R-S must prove that a pimp — or prostitute — earned income from the sex trade in order to prosecute.
Under Grassley’s bill, a pimp who fails to file a W-2 form for one of their prostitutes could be sentenced to a decade in prison. Grassley suggests it’ll give prosecutors a way to go after the kingpins of the sex trade who have evaded prosecution by conventional means. He concedes that pimps probably won’t start paying taxes or filing W-2 forms.
“But when the I-R-S finds out about it, they can go after you just like any other business person that wasn’t doing that,” Grassley says. Grassley calls the sex trade “vile” and he believes that if the bill becomes law, the I-R-S could go after sex traffickers and “yank from their grasp the girls and women they exploit.”