yes

Quite true. Though they did make some minor changes to the way taxes were handled awhile back so it wasn’t quite as simple as it once was to declare criminal earnings. While in theory the tax people should care about taxes, they do care about other crimes and work with other law enforcement to find and prosecute crimes including things like sex trafficking. That’s part of the importance of money laundering and why it’s become more important than ever in the US. The trade off is that it’s harder for criminals to pay taxes which takes away the almost guaranteed tax revenue of smarter criminals who would rather pay taxes than get locked up in an easy conviction tax case- but the gains are that while making paying taxes more difficult or risky for criminals does tend to reduce criminals reporting taxes semi honestly, it does make it easier to track and build finance based cases against criminals if all sorts. The bonus being that they can still be brought up on tax charges and…

.. wether any criminal case sticks or not the taxes and penalties can be collected from their estates, and if criminal activity charges don’t stick, the evidence from the criminal trial could lead to a tax conviction because if the complexity and intensity of resources es requires for identifying and investigating crimes through finances, it usually isn’t petty criminals but “big fish,” criminals deemed particularly dangerous, or those who are already stringy suspected or accused of crime but where evidence isn’t sufficient for a criminal conviction (like Capone) who make that elite list.

wise and true. If you find a dollar on the ground technically it is reportable. So duh. It’s always your risk. Start a business? Your risk. Train or study for a job? Your risk. Etc etc. you get some protections such as insurance or write offs for certain investments like stocks to partially incentivize these behaviors that expand the economy but also because they support the established order. NFT’s only arguably and likely barely do the first, and part of the crypto NFT draw is their existence beyond the system and such. The IRS is the system. It isn’t really in their interests at this point to try to stabilize and legitimize a market strongly rooted in being able to circumvent their existence.