The chairman of Iran’s Tax Affairs Organization announced gaining access to the bank account of 300,000 Iranian billionaires and said: “An assessment of the financial transactions of 300 thousand billionaires shows that half of them are not paying taxes and the other half are paying less than they must.”

With continued US sanctions and heavy drop in oil revenues, the government and parliament of Iran are trying to compensate for the revenue loss through other sources like the tax revenue, and the chairman of the parliament’s financial committee even described replacing “oil revenue” with “taxes” as a blessing in disguise and said: “While under sanctions, we have no other choice but to build the foundations of a new economy without oil.”

The chairman of the Tax Affairs Organization, Omid Ali Parsa, stated that these 300 thousand are people who have a taxable income of over one billion tomans a year. In another TV interview, Parsa also said that his organization has classified these billionaires into three groups of people with incomes over one billion, income over 20 billion, and income over 200 billion tomans.

“Until further notice, we are focused on cases with over 20 billion tomans of income which are 4376 cases,” Parsa continued. “In the face of these number of tax-evading billionaires, our 10 most deprived provinces are responsible for only half a percent of the country’s tax evasions.”

Parsa emphasized that everyone with all levels of income and wealth must pay their taxes and share the burden of managing the country.

However, so far the massive economic empire of the leader of the Islamic Republic which includes charity institutions and the economic branches and institutions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are still tax exempt and no changes have been made to their status.