Tag: irs

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.

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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.

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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.

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IRS Proposes to Directly Accept Tax Payments by Credit, Debit Cards

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on July 2 proposed rules changes that would allow taxpayers to directly make tax payments by credit or debit cards.

The IRS currently authorizes three third-party processors to collect tax payments made with credit or debit cards. The federal agency doesn’t charge a fee for this service, but those companies do.

For taxpayers wishing to pay with a credit card, the companies charge a fee that’s a percentage of the payment amount. Those paying with debit cards are charged a flat fee of just over $2.

Two existing restrictions have so far prevented the IRS from directly accepting tax payments by credit or debit cards. One regulation prohibits the IRS from paying any fee to use a third-party service to process taxes paid with credit and debit cards. The other prohibits the IRS from imposing any fee on individuals who pay taxes using those options.

The July 2 proposal would remove both prohibitions. If implemented, it would authorize the IRS to pay a fee to a card issuer or a bank to process a taxpayer’s payment.

By law, the IRS must seek to minimize such a fee. If the IRS does pay a fee, under the proposal, the IRS would pass that burden on to the taxpayer by charging for the “reimbursement” due with their taxes.

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‘Vast Majority’ of Pandemic Employee Retention Credit Claims Are Likely Scams, Says IRS

You can add the Internal Revenue Service to the ranks of federal agencies conceding that raining taxpayer money on all and sundry to offset the negative effects of pandemic-era closures didn’t go as well as intended. Not only was a program meant to offset the cost of paying workers during lockdowns and voluntary social-distancing prone to being gamed, but the “vast majority” of claims submitted to the program show evidence of being fraudulent.

In the course of a detailed review of the Employee Retention Credit, “the IRS identified between 10% and 20% of claims fall into what the agency has determined to be the highest-risk group, which show clear signs of being erroneous claims for the pandemic-era credit,” the IRS announced June 20. “In addition to this highest risk group, the IRS analysis also estimates between 60% and 70% of the claims show an unacceptable level of risk.”

The Employee Retention Credit was offered to businesses that were shut down by government COVID-19 orders in 2020 or the first three quarters of 2021, experienced a required decline in gross receipts during that period, or qualified as a recovery startup business at the end of 2021. But it was clear early on that scammers were taking advantage of giveaways of taxpayer money, either to claim it for themselves or to pose as middlemen helping unwitting business owners file claims.

In March of 2023, the tax agency warned of “blatant attempts by promoters to con ineligible people to claim the credit.” In September of that year, it stopped processing claims amidst growing evidence that vast numbers of applications were “improper,” as the IRS delicately puts it. In March 2024, the agency announced that its Voluntary Disclosure Program had recovered $1 billion (since raised to over $2 billion) in improper payouts from participants who got to keep 20 percent of the take.

Ultimately, only “between 10% and 20% of the ERC claims show a low risk” for fraud, even by generous federal standards for throwing other people’s money at problems largely of government creation.

“We will now use this information to deny billions of dollars in clearly improper claims and begin additional work to issue payments to help taxpayers without any red flags on their claims,” commented IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel.

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CIA prevented investigators from interviewing Hunter Biden lawyer, new IRS whistleblower docs say

Anew cache of documents from the IRS whistleblowers released Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee show how the Central Intelligence Agency directly intervened to prevent the IRS investigators from interviewing Hunter Biden lawyer and benefactor Kevin Morris.

The CIA’s involvement in the case was first suggested in earlier this year when the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees wrote a letter to Director William Burns that revealed impeachment investigators had at least one whistleblower who alleged the spy agency tried to interfere with a witness interview in the case, Just the News previously reported.

“According to the whistleblower, in August 2021, when IRS investigators were preparing to interview Patrick Kevin Morris, an associate of Hunter Biden, the CIA intervened to stop the interview,” Chairmen Jim Jordan and James Comer wrote. “Two DOJ officials were allegedly summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia for a briefing regarding Mr. Morris. At that meeting, it was communicated that Mr. Morris could not be a witness during the investigation.”

The new documents show IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler provided documents to the committee detailing the CIA’s intervention.

According to Shapley’s affidavit of the incident, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf from the Delaware prosecutor’s office in charge of the case and the Department of Justice Tax Division Attorney Jack Morgan were summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for a briefing.

At the meeting, the officials were given a classified briefing and were told by the CIA that the IRS “could no longer pursue” Kevin Morris as a witness in their case. Wolf did not share CIA’s reasoning with the IRS whistleblowers, who then requested their own briefing from the intelligence agency through Wolf.

According to Shapley’s account, Wolf ultimately failed to secure a briefing for the case investigators.

“Although AUSA Wolf initially appeared to be receptive to facilitating a briefing for me on the information, she ignored multiple attempts by me to arrange the briefing. Since obtaining this briefing was outside of my control, eventually I was forced to accept it would not happen,” Shapley wrote in his affidavit. “However, it served as yet another example of deviations from normal investigative processes in this matter.”

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Dirty Special Counsel Dave Weiss Retaliates Against Hunter Biden IRS Whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, Falsely Suggests They Were Under Investigation by Govt Agency

Two months ago, Special Counsel Dave Weiss retaliated against Hunter Biden IRS whistleblowers Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler by falsely suggesting they were under investigation by a government agency.

Weiss began retaliating against the whistleblowers in 2022, however, the special counsel filed a court document two months ago and falsely claimed Shapley and Ziegler were under investigation for potential misconduct.

Dave Weiss redacted information related to his claims against the whistleblowers under the guise of an “ongoing investigation.”

“Both SSA Shapley and SA Ziegler have filed whistleblower retaliation claims with OSC, and we understand OSC has requested related documents as part of an investigation into the retaliation claims. Specifically, SSA Shapley has alleged that now-Special Counsel David Weiss began retaliating against Shapley in November 2022 when Weiss learned Shapley had been making protected whistleblower disclosures about Weiss’s office to his IRS chain of command. Those disclosures included allegations Weiss’s office (the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware) engaged in prosecutorial misconduct in the Hunter Biden case by treating Mr. Biden more leniently than similarly situated taxpayers who were not politically connected.” Attorneys for the IRS whistleblowers wrote in a letter to the Acting Principal Deputy Special Counsel.

“Two months ago Special Counsel Weiss filed a document in one of the criminal prosecutions of Hunter Biden drafted and redacted carefully to lead the public to believe SSA Shapley and SA Ziegler were under investigation for potential misconduct. That March 11, 2024 filing opened by stating: “[T]wo IRS agents, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, . . . . have made unsubstantiated claims that prosecutors’ decision-making in this investigation was infected by politics.” The filing continued later: “[A]s described in the attached declaration, Exhibit 2 (filed under seal), the IRS has taken responsible steps to address Shapley’s and Ziegler’s conduct.” Over half of the next page was also redacted. The referenced Exhibit 2 stated the redactions were “to a potential ongoing investigation. . . and the government has filed three exhibits [under seal] that reference a potential ongoing investigation,” the letter stated.

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IRS Threatens to Target Biden’s Critics, Those Who Question Washington’s ‘Ability to Govern’

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is threatening to come after individuals or organizations who question Joe Biden or the federal government’s “ability to govern,” it has confirmed.

According to a report from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, the IRS is planning to expand its investigative interests to those who threaten the federal government’s “ability to govern” or present a “threat to the public safety or national security interests of the United States.”

He wrote in his Substack:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is positioned to do much more than just collect your taxes as it turns its attention to individuals who threaten the U.S. government’s “ability to govern,” a vague new criteria for criminal investigations, according to its own operating manual.

Buried in the fine print is the revelation that the IRS is pivoting away from its post-9/11 focus on financing of foreign terror groups like al Qaeda and criminal money laundering to a much broader and ill-defined “national security” threat. The shift, revealed in the latest versions of the voluminous Internal Revenue Manual, applies to IRS participation in dozens of federal government “national security” investigative task forces, which were previously referred to as “narcotics and terrorism” task forces until late last year.

Klippenstein goes on to make the case that such criteria is not typically within the investigative remit of a tax collecting agency:

Protecting stock markets and critical infrastructure, protecting the “ability to govern” — that is, the workings of United States officialdom– is hardly a mission historically associated with America’s tax collectors. Their inclusion as criteria to involve IRS special agents in federal investigations opens the door for overreach and abuse.

At a time when the IRS is subject to partisan political attack (the FY 2024 final budget reduced the $80 billion earmarked to the IRS by $20 billion), broadening the IRS mission does little to achieve what the agency says is its goal, which is forcing millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share.

Earlier this month, the IRS demanded a further $20 billion from Congress to further expand its operations.

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‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Roger Ver Charged With $50 Million Tax Evasion

Authorities in Spain have arrested cryptocurrency entrepreneur Roger Ver, once known as “Bitcoin Jesus,” after the U.S. Department of Justice charged him with tax evasion.

Unsealed Monday, the indictment alleges that Ver evaded paying taxes to the tune of nearly $50 million, conducted mail fraud, and filed false tax returns.

The DOJ says in its indictment that Ver allegedly lied to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) about how much Bitcoin he and his companies really owned. 

According to the feds, Ver was expected to file tax returns that reported capital gains from the sale of his “worldwide assets.” These assets included Bitcoin.

But the indictment alleges that despite Ver and his companies owning 131,000 Bitcoins, the crypto entrepreneur provided or caused to be provided false or misleading information—including the Bitcoin he personally owned—to a law firm and appraiser  helping him expatriate his American nationality. 

When he sold the Bitcoin in 2017, he allegedly did not inform the IRS about the gains he had made, despite the fact that the Bitcoins were held by U.S. corporations he was in charge of—named MemoryDealers and Agilestar.

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One Hundred Years of IRS Political Targeting

One hundred years ago, Senator James Couzens, a Michigan Republican, took to the Senate floor to denounce the Bureau of Internal Revenue for abusing its power and trampling innocent taxpayers. Couzens launched a sweeping Senate investigation of federal tax collectors. One year later, Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair personally delivered a demand for $10 million in back taxes as Couzens stepped out of the Senate chamber. Couzens fought the case, and eventually proved that he had actually overpaid his taxes by roughly one million dollars, as David Burnham noted in his 1989 classic, A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power. But the precedent of the IRS exploiting its power to attack its critics was firmly established.

President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers including William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer. FDR also dropped the IRS hammer on political critics such as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and prominent Republicans like former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Perhaps Roosevelt’s most pernicious tax skulduggery occurred in 1944 when he spiked an IRS audit of massive illegal campaign contributions from a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson. LBJ’s career would likely have been destroyed if Texans had learned of his dirty-dealing. Instead, LBJ survived and scores of thousands of Americans and more than a million Vietnamese died as a result.

President John F. Kennedy raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form. Shortly after capturing the presidency, JFK denounced “the discordant voices of extremism” and derided people “who would sow the seeds of doubt and hate” and make Americans distrust their leaders.

At a news conference a few days later, a reporter sought his views on the legality of campaign contributions supporting ”right-wing extremist groups.” Kennedy replied “As long as they meet the requirements of the tax law, I don’t think that the Federal Government can interfere or should interfere with the right of any individual to take any position he wants. The only thing we should be concerned about is that it does not represent a diversion of funds which might be taxable to—for nontaxable purposes. But that is another question, and I am sure the Internal Revenue system examines that.”

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