Tag: irs

IRS Whistleblower Removed From Hunter Biden Criminal Investigation, at Request of DOJ, Attorneys Say

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) removed a whistleblower and his team from a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes and business dealings, at the request of the Department of Justice, according to the whistleblower’s attorneys.

“Today the [IRS] Criminal Supervisory Special Agent we represent was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress,” the whistleblower’s lawyers said in a May 15 letter (pdf) addressed to multiple congressional lawmakers, first obtained by Just the News.

“He was informed the change was at the request of the Department of Justice.”

Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, has been under federal investigation for alleged tax fraud, lobbying crimes, and money laundering.

He confirmed back in December 2020 that his business deals were being investigated. Few details have been revealed about the probe since then.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Department of Justice for comment.

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It’s Been 10 Years Since the IRS’s Tea Party Scandal. Will Congress Finally Act?

A bombshell revelation came to light 10 years ago this week in 2013, when the IRS apologized for years of deliberately delaying applications for tax-exempt status from right-of-center organizations. Hundreds of groups were improperly subjected to baseless investigations, invasive and improper demands about their donors, and lengthy delays in processing routine paperwork. The IRS’s actions at the time put a severe chill on conservative speech at the height of the Tea Party movement and leading up to the 2012 presidential election.

The revelation set off years of investigations and resignations at the IRS. Yet the agency secretly continued its efforts to silence nonprofits disfavored by the agency’s bureaucrats and political appointees. In November 2013, the IRS proposed new regulations that were nearly as damaging to the First Amendment as the targeting itself.

The agency proposed severe limits on issue speech by certain nonprofits, which would have forced many nonprofits to reclassify as political action committees and publicly expose their donors’ names and home addresses. The IRS also solicited comments on potentially expanding the restrictions to cover trade associations and other groups in the future. After backlash from across the political spectrum, the proposal was withdrawn, but that victory does not change the sad fact that federal law governing nonprofits is no safer today than it was when IRS officials decided they had the authority to discriminate against groups based on their views.

Enter the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act, the subject of a full committee hearing tomorrow in the Committee on House Administration. The legislation addresses a broad range of election, free speech, and privacy-related issues, including remedies for the IRS’s sordid history of policing speech. The bill, first introduced in 2022 and awaiting reintroduction this Congress, would prohibit the IRS from writing new speech-chilling rules for nonprofits and codify Trump-era reforms protecting nonprofit donors against unnecessary disclosures and warehousing of their personal information.

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IRS to Prioritize Enforcement Including Criminal Investigation for Certain Assets

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said it would increase enforcement in the area of digital asset transactions and listed transactions.

The federal agency identified certain transactions to have high-risk issues in noncompliance and vowed to ramp up enforcement in those transactions.

“The IRS tracks many known, high-risk issues in noncompliance, such as digital asset transactions, listed transactions and certain international issues. These issues arise in multiple taxpayer segments, and data analysis shows a higher potential for noncompliance,” the tax agency wrote in its newly-released funding plan (pdf).

“We will prioritize resources to increase enforcement activities, including criminal investigation as appropriate,” the agency added.

According to the plan, the IRS will develop the information platform to support digital asset reporting and analytics tools to increase digital asset compliance in the fiscal year 2024, which is between April 1, 2023, and March 31, 2024.

Digital assets include convertible virtual currency, cryptocurrency, stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other digital representations of value, according to the IRS website.

The IRS treats digital assets as property and requires taxpayers to report taxable gains or losses from digital asset transactions.

As it’s difficult to identify the owners of digital assets, U.S. judges allow the IRS to use “John Doe summons” to seek the identities of taxpayers of interest.

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Biden’s IRS Overhaul Aims for Tenfold Increase in Audits

The IRS released its plan on Thursday for spending the $80 billion in new funding provided by the Democratic Inflation Reduction Act, emphasizing that it won’t be used to drive up audits on the middle class.

The 150-page Internal Revenue Service plan was released with the blessing of new Commissioner Danny Werfel. The report seeks to respond to Republican accusations that the agency will become supercharged and use its power to target non-rich families. It also highlighted the agency’s plans to streamline customer service and help people properly file their taxes and avoid the auditing process.

The IRS plans to bolster its workforce quickly. The agency indicated that it intends to hire more than 7,000 new employees by the end of next year working in just enforcement alone, in addition to about 6,500 new workers in taxpayer services. The Treasury Department has previously projected that such a large infusion of capital could lead to 87,000 new IRS employees over the next decade, although the new plan doesn’t project out that far.

Republicans argue that 87,000 more IRS workers is far too high a number, although Democrats have countered the GOP by noting that the tens of thousands of new employees will not all be auditors and will include thousands of workers in other roles. A large number of current IRS workers are also expected to retire in the coming years, partially offsetting the number of those being hired.

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Biden’s IRS goons dropped by Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi’s house while he was testifying before Congress … I wonder why?

While one of the journalists behind the Twitter Files was testifying about his finding in front of Congress, he was also being harassed by government goons who showed up to his house unannounced.

Matt Taibbi was in DC in early March to testify about the evidence he found of the government’s abuse of its relationship with Twitter and big tech to censor speech and control what Americans saw on their social media feeds. Meanwhile, the IRS had sent their folks out to Taibbi’s home to make an unscheduled visit.

TOTALLY NOT AN INTIMIDATION TACTIC!

The Wall Street Journal reported that Taibbi was visited because his previous tax returns from 2018 and 2021 had been rejected.

But they decided that an in-person visit was warranted instead of an electronic communication like you would normally expect.

It’s “not clear” why.

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This AI Knows Who You Are and Who All Your Friends Are (And Is Telling the IRS)

A Bay Area tech company wants to sell AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance software to determine not just who you are but track who your friends are, too.

Vintra is a San Jose-based firm whose “co-appearance” or “correlation analysis” software can, “with a few clicks,” according to the Los Angeles Times, take any individual on a surveillance camera and backtrace him to those he’s seen with most often. From there, the software can take people deemed “likely associates” and locate them on a searchable calendar.

The Times reports that AI-enabled co-appearance technology is already in use in Communist China as part of that country’s Orwellian “social credit” digital report-and-control scheme, but Vintra appears to be the first company to market it in the West.

It’s already in use by the U.S. government:

The firm boasts on its website about relationships with the San Francisco 49ers and a Florida police department. The Internal Revenue Service and additional police departments across the country have paid for Vintra’s services, according to a government contracting database.

The IRS needs to know who your friends are because reasons. Creepy, authoritarian reasons.

Back in December, I wrote about the time facial-recognition software got a New Jersey woman forcibly removed from a Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall around Thanksgiving because she works for a law firm engaged in a suit against a restaurant owned by the same parent company, MSG Entertainment, that owns Radio City. The lawyer, Kelly Conlon, was not in any way engaged in the long-running suit.

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Ticketmaster, PayPal, eBay are hassling customers to report sales even though the IRS says they don’t have to

People are being told they need to provide their Social Security numbers to online platforms and cash transfer app companies for the sales of things like clothes and concert tickets over $600, even though the IRS says they don’t need to.

The prompts from companies like eBay and Ticketmaster are the result of a change in the tax law that was reneged last-minute by the IRS ahead of the 2023 tax filing season.

The switch is causing a lot of confusion among taxpayers and tax professionals — and even within the IRS itself.

The threshold for reporting business income or personal income from using these apps was supposed to change this year. It was downgraded from sales above $20,000 to sales of above just $600 and was part of a provision passed in the 2021 American Rescue Plan.

That means you’d need to pay a capital gains tax on sales worth more than $600 if you used these apps to receive a payment.

But the IRS decided to delay this rule change from tax season 2023 to tax season 2024, citing “confusion during the … 2023 tax filing season” and the need to “provide more time for taxpayers to prepare and understand the new reporting requirements.”

The IRS said some taxpayers may be receiving 1099-K forms “in error.”

“Some individuals may receive a Form 1099-K for the sale of personal items or in situations where they received a Form 1099-K in error (i.e. for transactions between friends and family, or expense sharing),” the agency said in a statement.

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The Case for Abolishing the IRS

The American public has long held an unfavorable view of the Internal Revenue Service, as evidenced by several historical surveys. A Gallup poll taken more than 25 years ago in October 1997 found that 69 percent of the American public held the opinion that the IRS “frequently abuse[d] its powers.” Fast forward to October 2022, when another Gallup poll was taken on the American public’s job-performance rating of 11 federal agencies. The poll ranked the IRS dead last, with only 34 percent of Americans regarding the job performance of the IRS as “excellent/good.”

Another poll released by the Pew Research Center in March 2015 on the “complexity of the tax system” indicated that 72 percent of the American public were at least somewhat bothered by the complexity, and 44 percent were a lot bothered by it. Public concern over the complexity of the federal tax code is certainly understandable when you consider that the body of law that codifies all federal tax laws, the Internal Revenue Code (U.S. Code Title 26), comprised 6,979 pages as of year-end 2022.

Aside from the American public’s unfavorable view of the tax system, there is a real economic reason for addressing its complexity: the enormous cost of compliance for the American taxpayer, both individual and corporate. The Tax Foundation issued a report in August 2022 estimating that “Americans [would] spend over 6.5 billion hours complying with IRS tax filing and reporting requirements in 2022.” This equates to approximately 3.1 million full-time workers focused entirely on federal tax compliance.

The Tax Foundation estimates that the monetary cost of compliance based on its estimated 6.5 billion work hours would at minimum amount to $313 billion in 2022 — nearly 25 times greater than the IRS’s $12.6 billion 2022 budget with a workforce of approximately 80,000 employees.

An additional unknown cost of significant size is the time spent by American taxpayers in calling the IRS for tax-filing assistance. Based on information from the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service, Americans made 72.8 million calls to the IRS in 2022 seeking help. Only 7.4 million calls were answered — just over 10 percent — and these had an average wait time of 28 minutes.

The Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent organization within the IRS established in 1996 to help Americans address federal tax problems, issues an annual report to Congress every January with an assessment of the IRS’s prior-year operations and some legislative recommendations. The recommendations typically include more amendments to the Internal Revenue Code, more IRS rules and rule revisions, more funding from Congress, expanding jurisdiction of the U.S. Tax Court, and more mandates on the private sector, such as establishing new IRS competency standards for tax preparers. Hence, these ongoing annual recommendations, while well-intentioned, only serve to tinker with a massive system already fundamentally broken and beyond repair.

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