This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Well good for them. 
And the Repubs oppose greater funding for the IRS for the purposes of greater tax avoidance enforcement. Deplorable!
Progressively tax the gains from Roth holdings with the 1st $500k tax free.
Is this governance stuff really that difficult?
I wonder what IRAsdad thinks about this.
As for me, I’d rather support tax compliance enforcement.
My back of the envelope says that at reasonable rates of returns you might have been able to get up to half a million in an IRA if you started with your first job and maximized contributions. I guess more if you also rolled over a 401K that wasn’t under predatory management.
Yep, this is why the IRS needs more and better funding.
The sad truth is that these absurd IRAs are likely legal or that there is enough ambiguity in the law to prevent effective prosecution.
Its a classic GOP law that gives enough peanuts to the middle class to get their buy-in while allowing the vast majority of the benefit to accrue to the rich. They’ve been doing this for decades.
Well that is what I get for being ignorant, I should have looked to purchase non public shares that would be real cheap. Maybe a bonus?
Now, now there’s enough there to do both. Let’s not bicker over who is right, or rightest.
Non-public shares should be banned outright from any tax break incentives.
yes - many pension plans can and have been rolled into a self managed IRAs - leave a company after reaching full vesting - you can move it to a personal IRA account unconnected to your former employer
He’ll probably come back with a Rothless rebuttal
Over the years I’ve done pretty much the same thing. In the 80’s and 90’s I worked for firms who went under due to mismanagement or were gobbled up by other companies. The first thing I did when I was excessed from these companies was even before I received my compensation and applied for UI was to roll over my deferred comp or 401k to my personal IRA because I didn’t want to risk them being purloined by some nefarious executives.
When you look at what’s has been accumulated in peoples IRA’s including Roth’s it’s not unusual for some typical blue collar plumber or electrician to have over $1 million in them.
But what irks me is many of these folks who have benefited greatly from these retirement programs that are embedded into the tax code, a number of economists have rightly called them middle class welfare, love to go after and want to gut state and municipal pensions and consider those public sector workers who have put into them and have benefited from them to be greedy.
You might call that the Mother of All IRAs.
But, I know the Father of ALL IRAs: @irasdad.
I think I’m just about ready to join that exclusive club …
(checks lottery ticket)
Damn - maybe next week.
Damn. Mine is only worth $450K as of today.
Yes! I get really tired of all these politicians setting up vehicles to protect assets from taxation and then pretending to be “Shocked, shocked!!!” that the wealthy take advantage of them. And then they’re further horrified that the level of protection isn’t sufficient for the Masters of the Universe and they still game the system to the point of obscenity. 
At the risk of being a privileged Slate contrarian, if you made the maximum contribution to your 401(k) with a 4.5% of salary employer match and just dropped it all into an S&P 500 index fund, I am pretty sure it would be worth more than five million dollars.
So basically, if you just did what the government thinks you should do and wanted you and your employer to do, you would end up with a 401(k) worth an amount that the waifs at Propublica think is indecently and immorally large.
The scandal here is that so few people felt they could afford to do this.
Back in 2008 I had a pretty healthy nest egg for a guy my age and Bush’s recession burned down half of it and then I got laid off and eventually it was completely gone. My parents lost a lot of money too.