Tag: IRS

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crime and punishment folly general freedom tax policy

Thieves Caught, Return Loot

Thieve's Loot

Lyndon McLellan, a convenience store owner, was robbed. The marauders took $107,000 of his honestly earned money.

We don’t need the police to find out who did it (and no, the police themselves are not the culprit, not this time). The IRS took the money, suspecting that he “structured” his bank deposits to avoid reporting requirements. McLellan’s niece, responsible for making deposits, had followed a teller’s (bad) advice to deposit the money in such a way as to avoid paperwork. The IRS noticed the “too small” deposits and looted the account despite having no indication that the funds were ill-gotten.

“It took me 13 years to save that much money,” McLellan says, “and it took fewer than 13 seconds for the government to take it away.”

This, even though the IRS had recently promised not to summarily nab account contents solely for alleged “structuring.”

At first, the government offered to settle with McLellan by returning one half the money, their standard (and outrageous) offer in such cases. But neither McLellan nor the Institute for Justice — the champions of property rights helping him with the case — accepted the government’s “deal.”

Last week, the IRS dropped the case and agreed to return their booty. But only the principal. No interest, no attorney fees (for McLellan’s first lawyer), none of the $19,000 McLellan paid an accountant to prove his innocence.

IJ will continue to litigate. We can hope that the IRS will continue to lose.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thieve's Loot

 

Categories
Common Sense national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Poor, Poor IRS

Squeezing the Taxpayer

As Tax Day approaches, you can bet the Internal Revenue Service has readied itself to help taxpayers file their returns.

No?

“It’s abysmal,” admits IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, discussing his agency’s help for Americans trying to decipher a byzantine, ever-changing tax code.

It seems only four of ten citizens ever succeed in getting through to the IRS on the phone, even after waiting multiple hours. Over days. There have been over 5 million “courtesy disconnects” — that’s IRS lingo for its phone system hanging up on you.

To boot, once you get to a real person, that employee can’t tell you much.

The problem? According to the Washington Post, the poor agency lacks the necessary funds because “Republicans on Capitol Hill have slashed the IRS budget.”

Actually, the IRS budget has gone up every year . . . in nominal dollars. When adjusted for inflation? Well, there has been some decline.

Bemoaning this supposed “era of shrinking government,” the Post assails conservatives in Congress, citing the “cuts” as “punishment for a string of missteps: an extravagant conference for employees in Anaheim, Calif., the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax exemptions, $1 million in bonuses given to agency employees who didn’t pay their federal taxes.”

Punishment seems in order.

But another story puts in perspective this crocodile cry for more money. The Daily Caller recently reported: “The Obama administration has quietly killed an IRS tax preparation program designed to help low-income and disadvantaged citizens, choosing instead to give millions of dollars to liberal groups for the same purpose.”

Look on the bright side, a review of these help-groups found their advice to have a mere 49 percent error rate.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Squeezing the Taxpayer

 

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government transparency

How Earnest Is The IRS?

Sometimes those who wield power over us seem less than honest about whether they’re following their own professed rules, including rules mandated by law.

The latest example comes to us courtesy of the watchdog group Cause of Action, which filed a Freedom of Information request for correspondence between the IRS and the White House about tax returns. The correspondence may reveal something about, say, political targeting of  taxpayers by IRS and/or Obama administration officials and/or others.

The IRS admits that it has more than 2,000 documents related to the request. It has been ordered by a court to release them. But the agency refuses to do so, citing confidentiality requirements. Yes, Gentle Reader. Because taxpayer information must be kept confidential, no information relevant to whether confidentiality requirements have been violated may be divulged.

How about releasing the communiqués after scrubbing any taxpayer addresses or Social Security Numbers? I mean, if taxpayer confidentiality is a genuine concern.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest either joshingly or earnestly assures The Hill that the Obama administration has been “very rigorous” in enforcing proper communication between the IRS and the White House. I fear that his knowledge of the 2,000 documents — and of the Obama administration’s record of truth-telling — is not exhaustive. . . .

How likely is this obstructionism motivated by concern for taxpayers?

I bet it’s motivated by concern to protect the posteriors of bureaucrats and politicians.

I salute all those refusing to let the stonewallers get away with it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption

Keep Targeting the IRS

We’re still unraveling the IRS’s prolific crimes.

I mean, those pertaining to its ideological targeting of conservative applicants for non-profit status.

I’m satisfied that the various individuals and organizations suing the IRS or publishing commentaries on this still-unfolding scandal (Day 552 now) will keep on keepin’ on. I’m a little worried, though, about Congress.

Granting that congressional investigators have been reasonably if imperfectly diligent, my hope is that they’ll prove even tougher in the coming session.

Some chairman must step down soon because of the GOP’s term limits on committee chairs; these include Darrell Issa of the Oversight and Reform Committee. TaxProf Blog’s Paul Caron, scandal tracker par excellence, says Issa’s successor should be one who “has done as much as anyone to shine a light on IRS abuse of the President’s philosophical opponents, both in hearings and behind the scenes.”

The man he means is Representative Jim Jordan. Long before we ever heard of pivotal IRS malefactor Lois Lerner, Jordan had been “seeking answers from the IRS’s tax-exempt organizations chief on political targeting allegations.”

Indeed, Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer for victims of the IRS, believes that without Jordan there would have been no Treasury investigation to get the ball rolling “and no public admission that, indeed, conservative groups were being subjected to unprecedented scrutiny and mistreatment.” (Plus, see the congressman’s recent press release lamenting a dismissal of charges against the IRS.)

I’m convinced; let’s have Jordan. And let’s pursue this investigation to the bitter end.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary national politics & policies tax policy

IRS Re-Unleashed

Outrageous. That’s the best word for the recent court decision letting the Internal Revenue Service off the hook for ideologically targeting organizations that apply for tax-exempt status.

True the Vote, which combats voter fraud, sued the Internal Revenue Service because of the tax agency’s deliberate obstruction of applications from Tea Party and conservative organizations like True the Vote. The long delay in approval was costly in part because many prospective contributors to TTV had been awaiting the granting of 501(c)(3) status before going ahead with their donations. True the Vote’s president, Catherine Engelbrecht, was also harassed by other government agencies after submitting the application to IRS.

Nevertheless, Judge Reggie Walton has cavalierly dismissed the suit, asserting that the eventual granting of the tax-exempt status means that the IRS had taken adequate “remedial steps to address the alleged behavior.”

Following the same exalted principle of jurisprudence, Walton would presumably dismiss charges against a mugger so long as at some point the arrested criminal had tossed the wallet back to his victim.

The dismissal, no matter how outrageous, is not in the tiniest bit surprising.

IRS personnel often behave as if they may assault our rights (e.g., to our bank accounts) with impunity, so long as they occasionally defer to our protests by announcing temporary or cosmetic reforms. Others in government cooperate in letting the agency run riot. Perhaps because they agree that the IRS (maybe themselves, too) should enjoy virtually unlimited power over us.

Or perhaps simply because they, like the rest of us, are scared of the IRS.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment insider corruption

Learning Lerner’s M.O.

I fib. We’re not really learning anything new about Lois Lerner’s modus operandi. It’s just the same old wiping of evidence — evidence that she and others at IRS knew was relevant to congressional inquiry into IRS misconduct.

Lerner is the former IRS department head in charge of reviewing applications of non-profits for tax-exempt status. Her department targeted right-leaning applicants for special obstruction and delay. The practice began to come to light a couple of years ago.

Congress has asked for a great deal of documentation from the Internal Revenue Service that has yet to be supplied, including all of Lerner’s pertinent email. As I’ve discussed before, the IRS has claimed that her hard drives accidentally crashed in June of 2011 — and not hers alone — so that much of the relevant email is gone.

No backups on any server, either.

It all sounded pretty bogus back when the story was “hot.” And now, according to testimony of an IRS employee just filed in the case of Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service, it transpires that Ms. Lerner had a BlackBerry on which her email traffic was routinely duplicated … and that this device was wiped in June 2012, months after Congress started asking questions about the ideological targeting of applicants for tax-exempt status.

Judicial Watch, my hero, is now urging the court to require the IRS to divulge the relevant dates of the wiped data, then subpoena BlackBerry for the data. Because we all know that it hasn’t really disappeared forever into the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.