Tag: irs

IRS Failed To Properly Dispose of Sensitive Tax Documents, Report Finds

Earlier this year, a federal judge sentenced a former IRS contractor to five years in prison for leaking the tax returns of multiple high-profile billionaires. The case involves genuine wrongdoing by someone entrusted with people’s private information. But a new report from the U.S. Treasury Department found the IRS itself was routinely negligent with taxpayer documents in its possession.

“The IRS receives and creates a significant volume of sensitive documents and is responsible for protecting these sensitive documents from receipt to disposal,” according to a report from the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). Specifically, federal agencies must “shred, burn, mulch, pulp, or pulverize sensitive documents beyond recognition and reconstruction.”

The TIGTA report notes that since 2009, the IRS has contracted with an unnamed “outside national vendor” to do this. The vendor provides IRS facilities with locked bins to store sensitive documents, which are later picked up to dispose of the documents securely.

This vendor services “387 (75 percent) of 514 IRS facilities,” the report notes, while another 17 facilities contract with local companies. But for the rest, it’s apparently a free-for-all: “We found that the IRS is unaware of what sensitive document destruction capabilities are in place for the 110 facilities not covered under a contract. For example, the IRS initially thought the Andover, Massachusetts, facility was covered by a local sensitive document destruction contract. After we inquired about the contract, the IRS discovered that this facility was not covered by any contract.”

When the auditors then performed a site visit at that facility, they found “trash containers being used for all waste, including sensitive documents that contained tax information and Personally Identifiable Information.”

Keep reading

The IRS Is Required To Protect Kids From Identity Theft. They’re Not Complying.

Children are surprisingly frequent victims of identity theft—around 25 percent of them will experience identity fraud or theft by the time they reach adulthood. The consequences of bad credit caused by fraud are both steep and difficult to reverse. Thankfully, the government is required to alert child victims of identity theft. However, it is failing to meet these obligations, leaving easy paths for identity theft open.

The IRS is legally required to inform parents if their child’s identity is being used to commit tax fraud. But according to Shoshana Weissmann, the digital director for the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank, the IRS has refused to do so because the kids in question don’t have active tax accounts.

Kids in foster care are also particularly vulnerable to identity theft. In an attempt to remedy this, federal law requires states to run credit checks on foster kids over the age of 14, but most eligible children have not received these checks. “Even those who received any or all reports received little help understanding them,” Weissmann notes. “And few children facing identity fraud receive any help resolving it.”

The Social Security Administration (SSA) doesn’t make things much better. Since most possible Social Security numbers have already been given out, a criminal who makes up a number has better than even odds that it is already in use or about to be assigned to someone else. Instead of taking steps to fix this vulnerability, Weissmann writes that the SSA doesn’t check whether a number has been used in fraud before assigning it—leaving newborns saddled with bad credit histories from birth.

The stakes of this negligence are high. “More than half of minors who were victims of identity theft report being denied access to credit at least once because of it, and some deal with the consequences for a decade or more,” Weissmann writes. “Some have even acquired a lifelong criminal record for an offense committed by the thief that stole their identity.”

Keep reading

IRS Expands Its Armed Wing To Highest Level In Nearly A Decade

The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) division, the armed enforcement wing of the IRS tasked with combating financial crimes, has expanded its workforce by nearly 11 percent, bringing staffing levels to their highest in nearly a decade and boosting the division’s conviction rate to 90 percent, according to the IRS-CI’s latest annual report.

As Tom Ozimek reports, via The Epoch Times, the fiscal year 2024 report, released on Dec. 5, outlines a year of intensified enforcement for the IRS-CI, which serves as the tax agency’s law enforcement branch that focuses on tax violations that cross into criminal territory.

The report shows that the division achieved several firsts over the past year, including the first sentencing for syndicated conservation easement schemes, the first cryptocurrency tax fraud indictment, and a record-setting financial settlement with Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, for anti-money laundering violations.

Keep reading

Elon Musk Says DOGE Will Audit The IRS

Elon Musk, new co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency declared this week that the new outfit will seek to audit the IRS.

It started with Musk asking X users what they think should happen to the IRS budget, given that it just asked for an increase of $20 billion.

Musk then responded to a post imagining the IRS being audited.

Is Musk serious? Probably.

Keep reading

IRS whistleblowers knew Hunter Biden laptop scandal “was real,” but prosecutors didn’t want to touch “the big guy”

The Biden Crime Family is back in the news, this time thanks to the consciences of IRS whistleblowers who have come forward to reveal that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal is, in fact, a big deal, but that prosecutors are reluctant to touch it because they fear Hunter’s father Joe, also known as “the big guy.”

Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers involved in the Hunter Biden tax scandal case say that investigators at not just their employer but also at the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) knew that Hunter Biden’s laptop “was real,” but were quickly silenced by prosecutors who demanded that they keep quiet about it ahead of the 2020 election.

“There were a lot of overt investigative steps that we were not allowed to take because we had an upcoming election,” one of the whistleblowers explains in the video below. “The prosecutors … told us that they didn’t want to ask about ‘the big guy.’ We corroborated that ‘the big guy’ was Joe Biden. Yes.”

Keep reading

Trump Suggests He Could Abolish Federal Income Tax Entirely

Donald Trump has sensationally suggested that he could abolish federal income tax for Americans entirely if he wins the presidency.

Trump made the comments during a visit to a barber shop in the Bronx after he was asked if there was “a way to eliminate federal taxes.”

Suggesting that America could return to the policies of the late 1800s, when income tax funds were replaced by new trade tariffs, Trump said America could go back to a time “when we were a smart country” and “relatively the richest it ever was.”

“It had all tariffs — it didn’t have an income tax,” said Trump.

“Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying. They’re paying tax, and they don’t have the money to pay the tax,” he added.

The presidential candidate said that during the 1890’s, America was becoming so rich, “We had to set up committees, blue ribbon committees (on) how to spend our wealth – we had no idea how to spend it there was so much money.”

“Then we went to the income tax system and the rest is sort of history,” said Trump.

Keep reading

Held Hostage Overseas? The IRS Wants Your Back Taxes.

Many Americans who return home after being illegally detained overseas arrive to find they’ve been billed thousands of dollars by the IRS—including late fees for unpaid taxes.

That’s the bizarre situation in which hostages Evan Gerskovich, Paul Whelan, and Vladimir Kara-Murza found themselves after they were released from detention in Russia last month. All three men say they faced a battery of surprise financial issues after returning home, including tax charges and hits to the credit stemming from bills they were unable to pay while behind bars.

“I got one of those bills from the IRS saying, you owe this much on this year, you owe this much on this year because of failure to pay on time—here’s the interest that’s accrued,” Washington Post reporter and former hostage Jason Rezaian told NPR. He faced more than $6,000 in fees for unpaid taxes after his release, following 544 days of detention in Iran. “This is an oversight that nobody really thought about.”

And they’re not alone. Right now, between 40 and 60 American nationals are being illegally detained by other nations, according to NPR. Many of these Americans will return home to face startling financial penalties stemming from their unjust imprisonment.

Keep reading

IRS Agents for Harris

The National Treasury Employees Union has come out to offer their full support to the Harris-Walz campaign. Is anyone surprised that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is in favor of a Kamala presidency?

Kamala Harris prides herself on passing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest spending measure in US history, that initially aimed to employ an additional 87,000 IRS agents. Then the Biden-Harris Administration provided these agents with far more than the power to audit and steal from Americans.

The Biden Administration began arming select IRS agents in 2022 and providing them with basic military training. Accountants were trained by the federal government to raid private residences. Biden attempted to recruit an additional 87,000 agents but was temporarily blocked. IRS agents now must complete “firearms, defensive tactics, and building entry.” This militarized branch of the government is expected “to apply the appropriate degree of force necessary to safely carry out enforcement activities, including issuing search warrants, arrests, surveillance, dignitary protection, undercover activities, and seizures.”

Back in the 1970s, I had two armed IRS agents barge in with guns and handcuffs, claiming I owed payroll taxes. I immediately called my accountant who handled payroll who told the agents over the phone that he wrote and distributed the checks. It just so happened I was getting refund checks often, and I actually had one on my desk at the time. I asked why their agency was sending me refund checks if I owed them money. They looked at the check, and it had some code they recognized that denoted it was a refund for payroll taxes. It turned out to be a computer error on their part, and every time we would send in the payroll taxes, it kept trying to apply it to one month, where I owed $2 and promptly refunded the rest. Since the checks were addressed to me personally, I had no idea there was any distinction. The agents left, and I had to pay interest to cash the checks, which I somehow should have known was their mistake.

Keep reading

5,800 IRS Employees And Contractors Owe Nearly $50 Million In Unpaid Taxes: Treasury IG

At least 5,800 IRS employees and contractors owe almost $50 million in overdue taxes and more than half of them haven’t been required to agree to a payment plan, according to the Department of the Treasury’s Inspector-General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

In a report made available to The Epoch Times, TIGTA  said auditors found 3,414, or 4 percent, of the 85,359 employees at the IRS have unpaid taxes. Of those with payment plans, $9 million remains unpaid, while $12 million is owed by employees without a payment plan.

Among IRS contractors, which include many former tax agency employees, 2,573 of 25,732 (10 percent) contractors have unpaid taxes. Of those without a payment plan, $17 million is owed and those with a payment plan have $8 million outstanding.

The TIGTA also reported that 512 former IRS employees were rehired, either as employees or contractors, despite having “tax compliance issues or conduct and performance problems, including criminal misconduct, sexual misconduct, inability to perform duties, fighting and assault, and unauthorized access to tax return information, have been rehired by the agency and its contractors,” according to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who requested the watchdog’s report.

Keep reading

IRS Crackdown Nets Enough Revenue To Fund the Government for 90 Minutes

The Biden administration’s expensive efforts at beefing up the IRS’ ability to target wealthier Americans with unpaid federal taxes have finally netted $1 billion in additional revenue.

Or, to put it another way, the yearlong campaign has generated enough cash to fund the federal government for…about 90 minutes.

Do the math. The United States spent about $6.1 trillion last year. That translates to roughly $16.7 billion per day or about $700 million per hour. Against the federal government’s insatiable appetite for spending, even unfathomably large figures like $1 billion are reduced to mere rounding errors.

That $1 billion was the result of what the IRS calls “stepped up activity” targeting about 1,600 individuals with incomes of over $1 million and who owed over $250,000 in known tax debt. The $1 billion in new revenue comes from payments made by about 1,200 individuals, according to the IRS.

“Our increased work in this area means these past-due tax bills from high-end taxpayers are no longer being left on the table, like they were too often in the past,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a press release.

Of course, everyone should pay the amount of tax that they legally owe—and not one penny more. And, yes, $1 billion in additional revenue brings the federal books marginally closer to balancing.

But this announcement mostly serves to underscore the size of America’s fiscal problems and the utter inability to solve them by closing the so-called “tax gap.” The federal government is on pace to run a deficit of $2 trillion this year and a cumulative deficit of over $20 trillion in the next decade. Closing that gap will require a complete overhaul of the federal budget and a rethinking of the role of government.

Keep reading