Imagine smash and grab person, he or she will be charged for that, but bot for selling that and not taxing that profit. Or small scale drug dealer, he makes money but does not get charged with tax evasion. Same for robbery or embezzlement or anything. Why are tax evasion charges not being added on top of original charges??
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There are a couple of reasons.
1) At the federal level, most cases are settled through plea bargains. So the federal government will draw up a long list of charges against a defendant and negotiate with them to plead guilty to a charge or a subset of charges to end the case. So in those cases, tax evasion charges might be brought but dropped as part of the plea bargain.
2) Difficulty to prove tax evasion. In your example of a small scale drug dealer, the big crime is obviously selling the drugs. If there’s a firearm involved, that’s another charge that can be tacked on to the defendant. You can have an informant or an undercover make a purchase from the drug dealer, establishing that they are, in fact, selling illegal drugs. But it’s much more difficult to prove how much that drug dealer was retaining from each sale and not reporting as income. Since it’s a primarily cash business, it’s hard to document how much is getting kicked up to the drug distributor who supplies the dealer and how much the dealer keeps. Or in a smash-and-grab case, again, the theft is the big charge. Proving they generated income from the sales and didn’t report it is much more challenging.
3) Lack of sexiness – Some prosecutors are going to be worried that a jury might grab onto a less “sexy” charge of tax evasion rather than a drug dealing charge to convict the defendant of something, even if it’s not the top count. And a lot of accounting talk (necessary to show that the defendant had income, declared some of it, paid taxes on some of it, and evaded taxes on another portion) is putting the jurors into “my eyes glaze over” territory.
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