Tag: irs

SCOTUS Allows IRS to Carry Out Secret, Warrantless Searches of Innocent Taxpayers’ Bank Accounts

In a unanimous opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court is allowing the IRS to go on secret, warrantless fishing expeditions through innocent taxpayers’ bank records in order to identify and collect unpaid taxes from family members and associates who have no legal interest in those bank accounts.

Despite acknowledging that “the authority vested in tax collectors may be abused, as all power is subject to abuse,” and that “Congress has given the IRS considerable power,” the Supreme Court’s 9-0 ruling in Polselli v. IRS declined to restrict the IRS’s authority. Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute and Cato Institute had filed an amicus brief in Polselli arguing that the sweeping investigatory power wielded by the IRS—to circumvent the Fourth Amendment by carrying out warrantless searches of the bank accounts and records of innocent people, who are given no notice or right to object to the search, merely because they may be associated with a delinquent taxpayer—offends every constitutional sensibility on the right to privacy.

“This practice of investigating the bank records of innocent taxpayers because they may have family members or associates who are delinquent on their taxes is merely a perverse form of guilt by association,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “At a minimum, Fourth Amendment protections should not disappear just because sensitive information is shared with third parties, such as banks and attorneys.”

The case arose after an IRS Revenue Officer, seeking to collect underpaid federal taxes by Remo Polselli, served summonses on the banks of Polselli’s wife and attorney in order to find account and financial records concerning Polselli. The IRS agent did not notify Polselli’s wife or attorney of the summonses, but the banks voluntarily did so. Polselli’s wife and attorney subsequently filed motions in federal district court to quash the IRS’s summonses. In siding with the IRS, the district court held that Polselli’s wife and attorney are not entitled to notice of the summons and have no right to even be heard on their motions to quash the summonses.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading