The current code taxes labor reliably while allowing capital, wealth, perks, and inherited appreciation to escape or defer tax. The Accord taxes progressively by broadening the base, applying higher rates at the top, and pairing broad consumption taxation with monthly rebates and luxury surcharges.
Today's payroll tax (FICA) catches paycheck wages reliably and almost nothing else, and it caps at $168,600 — wages above that cap escape the payroll tax entirely. Bonuses partially in the base. Equity vesting, exercised options, perks, deferred compensation, partnership distributions, platform income, and service income flow around it via timing, classification, and entity games.
The reliable contributors are wage earners. The unreliable contributors are everyone with discretion over how their compensation is delivered. The result is a tax system whose published rates only apply to the people who can't choose the form of their pay.
The Flat Payroll Tax — a single 28% rate applied to every compensation form on the same source-collection footing, uncapped. Substance governs treatment: the form of the payment does not determine whether tax is collected. The base supports the payroll tax and the progressive income-tax rate ladder, plus Social Security accrual on the full comprehensive base rather than the FICA-capped wage base. Same effective rate on a school teacher and a hedge-fund partner.
Anyone receiving compensation in any form. The instrument is structurally invisible to W-2 wage earners — their experience does not change. It bites high earners with discretion over their compensation form, who can no longer choose the lowest-tax channel.
Ordinary wage earners and small businesses paying ordinary wages — already in the base, no change. The protection is structural, not threshold-based: the rule applies uniformly so that no high-income taxpayer can reroute around it.
Not separately scored.
Comprehensive withholding does not have a standalone revenue line. Its load is realized in the payroll tax and income-tax aggregates because withholding the full base is what makes those rates collectable. The measure of the stream's value is what would otherwise leak — the gap between today's statutory top rates and the effective rates the top of the income distribution actually pays after compensation-form games.
See tax ladder · fiscal scoring
- Wage-to-equity recharacterization
- Vested equity and exercised options enter the base; carried-interest and founder-equity conversions close through the wage-to-capital subpage.
- Deferred-comp timing
- Source collection at the substance-of-payment moment; deferral of withholding to a later year does not delay the tax.
- Partnership special allocations
- Allocations lacking economic substance fail the substance test; the allocated amount enters the active participant's compensation base.
- Contractor classification arbitrage
- An economic-substance test governs misclassification; misclassified relationships flow through withholding as W-2 employment.
- Perk and fringe-benefit non-reporting
- Fringe benefits enter the base at fair value; a published de minimis threshold continues for genuinely incidental items.
Detail rules for each closure live in the linked loophole subpages.
- payroll tax
- payroll tax applies to the same comprehensive base. The base is what makes the levy hard to evade.
- Progressive rate ladder
- The ladder rates apply to the comprehensive base. The top statutory rate is what the top of the distribution actually pays.
- Capital-gains convergence
- The convergence rule governs the gain rate above the lifetime cap. The base it applies to is established here through the substance-over-form rule.
- Social Security 2.0
- Benefit accrual on the full comprehensive base, not the FICA-capped wage base. SS 2.0 stretched bend-points calibrate from this broader base.
The comprehensive base is the layered-enforcement entry point. The corporation's compensation declaration funds its own deduction; the same disclosure becomes the audit basis for the recipient's withholding, the recipient's income-tax return, and the recipient's estate-tax-prepayment filing if applicable. False statement at any layer is independently tax fraud — and the disclosed records are evidence for every other instrument that touches the same base.
Compliance burden on smaller employers issuing irregular compensation forms — equity, contractor payments, irregular bonuses.
IRS-published source-collection schedules per compensation type. Existing W-2 infrastructure already handles wages, bonuses, and most equity. The genuine new lift is non-cash perks and platform-income reporting; that's substantively similar to existing 1099-K and 1099-MISC infrastructure with broader applicability. Cutover is uniform on the scheduled date — no carve-outs.
Honesty about gaps. The Accord's credibility comes partly from explicit acknowledgment of what is not yet specified. The items below are flagged for v10.2 specification or for outside expert review.
- Equity-grant withholding timing: collect on grant vs. vest vs. exercise. The substance principle is to collect when the worker has unrestricted access to the value, but the implementation rule across restricted stock, ISOs, NQSOs, and RSUs needs explicit specification.