Tag: taxes

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.”

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Two more female cops close to disgraced NYPD Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, including his driver, raked in massive OT and other perks

More female officers in disgraced top cop Jeffrey Maddrey’s orbit pulled down massive overtime and other perks, The Post has learned.

The driver for the former chief of department made an eye-popping $163,414 in OT last year — and resigned days after The Post exposed her boss’s alleged sleazy conduct at police headquarters, records show.  

Detective Ingrid Sanders was the seventh-highest overtime earner in the department, boosting her total salary last fiscal year to $352,462, records show.

That put her pay not far behind Lt. Quathisha Epps, the top earner who made $403,515, including $204,453 in OT. Epps filed an explosive Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint accusing Maddrey of giving Epps overtime shifts in exchange for sex, The Post revealed in a front-page exclusive Sunday.

On the day of the Post’s inquiry, Maddrey quit. Sanders was immediately transferred from One Police Plaza to a Queens precinct, and filed for retirement on Dec. 23, The Post found in police documents.

Sanders is a first-grade detective — the top grade — who served in the chief of department’s office since December 2022. She followed Maddrey there from the Patrol Services Bureau. She didn’t return multiple messages.

Maddrey also sought favors for second detective, Ada Reyes, The Post has learned.

Epps, Maddrey’s personnel manager, told The Post that part of her OT was devoted to taking care of Reyes.

“The overtime that he would give me he would tell me to buy her things like get her some towels and things from Walmart, a microwave, and stuff like that so she doesn’t have to come out of her pocket,” Epps said. “I make the overtime and then I give things to her.

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Biden White House to Give Another $2.5 Billion to Ukraine – After a $1.25 Billion Donation on Friday!

Joe Biden’s handlers announced another $2.5 billion will be gifted to Ukraine.

Today’s multi-billion dollar donation included an additional $1.25 billion drawdown package for the Ukrainian military and a $1.22 billion Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) package.

Biden’s handlers are hoping to escalated the Russia-Ukrainian conflict before the senile Democrat leaves office.

Who’s up for World War III?

The Biden team announced the latest donation early Monday morning on the White House website.

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NYC Desk-Jockey Cop Used Questionable Overtime to Get Paid Same Amount as Joe Biden Last Year

The highest-paid employee of the New York City Police Department is facing an internal affairs probe after making over $400,000 last year then trying to file for retirement.

Lt. Quathisha Epps, who worked as an administrator, is under investigation over allegations that she fudged her overtime hours and endorsed her own time slips, per an exclusive report from the New York Post.

The staffer supposedly worked 1,627 hours of overtime beyond her usual shifts, putting her average at 74 hours per week. However, unnamed sources told the Post there were “complaints over her coming into work late, leaving early, or not showing up at all.”

Epps raked in $204,000 in overtime on top of her nearly $165,000 base salary, placing her salary near $400,000 and making her the highest-paid employee across the entire NYPD.

The police force has 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian staffers, per official statistics.

And she made more than all of them.

She therefore made more than NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, in whose office she worked. Her boss made a comparatively dismal $292,000.

Epps was suspended after she filed for retirement at 51 years old, a move that will affect her pension and lose her about $12,000 per year since she is leaving just short of 20 years into her time on the force.

But she will still pull in $16,000 per month.

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Meet the new generation of tax resisters refusing to pay for war

In light of the coronavirus pandemic, the IRS has taken the unusual step of extending the tax season to July 15 — a move that gives people more time to consider using the old, but often overlooked tactic of war tax resistance from the safety of their homes.

For most people tax season is a hassle — involving organizing paperwork, gathering receipts, slogging through indecipherable forms — but it’s hardly an ethical or moral quandary. However, war tax resisters see taxes through a moral lens. For them it is a time ripe with opportunities for civil disobedience, charitable giving, and sophisticated accounting in the pursuit of peace — and now public health — by refusing to pay some or all of their income tax (and even their employment taxes in some cases).

The tactic is most associated with historic peace churches, including Quakers and Mennonites, and Vietnam-era anti-war activists. As a result, the demographic associated with the tactic tends to be older, but in an age of never-ending wars, climate change and an escalating pandemic, it is now being explored by millenials and younger people.

The War Resisters League, or WRL, a secular pacifist organization founded in 1923, estimates that in fiscal year 2021, some 47 percent of the federal budget will be allocated to military spending. The budget (nearly $3.5 trillion dollars in 2021) is funded by income taxes, hence war tax resisters primary focus on refusing to pay income taxes.

There are a variety of ways to avoid income taxes, some of which are legal and others which are not. Resisters may choose to live under the taxable level ($12,400 for an individual in 2020), which is legal, while others choose to file their taxes and refuse to pay any amount owed, which is illegal. Some even choose to send the money that they would have paid in taxes to a charity or non-profit, which could be an attractive option for those wanting to redirect their money to support those risking their lives to respond to the coronavirus. A host of options between those two poles are outlined by WRL and the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, or NWTRCC, a coalition of groups and individuals founded in 1982 to support war tax resistance.

“It encourages you to question how you’re relating to other people and society,” said Rev. Jerry Maynard, a 26-year-old Independent Catholic Priest, founding pastor of The People’s Church, and NWTRCC board member, who has been practicing war tax resistance since 2013. “It makes you aware that you aren’t just a fleeting reality in this giant, expansive world, but you’re really a cog in the machine. [At the same time] you’re conscious, so you can decide whether you want to turn this way or that way or if you don’t want to turn at all.”

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Kathy Hochul signs law that fines energy companies $75 billion for ‘climate change’

New Yorkers, beware the law of unintended consequences.

From an item at the New York Post comes the news that Kathy Hochul has just signed a new bill, “modeled after a federal law that holds polluters responsible for abandoned toxic-waste sites,” which establishes the New York Climate Superfund. This endowment will be funded by energy companies that deal in gas, oil, and coal, and the money will finance “resiliency projects,” like initiatives to shore up the coast and mitigate flooding—because obviously as every progressive and mainstream media consumer “knows,” energy that comes from “fossil fuels” cause “climate change.”

As of now, a number of companies operating in New York have been hit with $75 billion in fines, which are to be paid into the fund over the span of a decade. Per the NY Post:

The oil giant Saudi Aramco of Saudi Arabia could be slapped with the largest annual assessment of any company — $640 million a year — for emitting 31,269 million tons of greenhouse gases from 2000 to 2020.

Aramco — formally known as the Saudi Arabian Oil Co. — is owned by the Saudi Royal family.

The state-owned Mexican oil firm Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, emitted 9,512 tons of CO2 and could face an $193 million assessment for generating 9,512 million tons of greenhouse gases.

Russia’s Lukoil could be assessed with a $100 million yearly fee for spewing 4,912 millions of CO2.

The 38 companies identified as carbon polluters include American petro giants such as Exxon and Chevron as well as Shell and BP in the UK, Total Energies IES in France, Petrobras in Brazil, BHP in Australia, Glencore in Switzerland, Equinor in Norway and ENI in Italy.

Another greedy, communistic money grab. What the left doesn’t get as they cheer on the theft is that once it’s normalized for the “ultra rich” it’s then normalized for the “rich”… and then it’s normalized for the upper middle class… then the lower middle class, and so on—it’s a war on wealth, using Saul Alinsky’s infamous line about “rub[bing] raw the sores of discontent” as a vehicle.

Did you know that when the federal income tax started it only applied to less than 1% of Americans? Now look where we are.

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Biden Pledges More Arms To Ukraine After Christmas Strikes

President Joe Biden on Christmas Day said he has directed the Pentagon to continue its “surge of weapons deliveries to Ukraine,” following a wave of Russian air attacks on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure early Christmas morning.

“The purpose of this outrageous attack was to cut off the Ukrainian people’s access to heat and electricity during winter and to jeopardize the safety of its grid,” Biden said in a statement.

“Let me be clear: the Ukrainian people deserve to live in peace and safety, and the United States and the international community must continue to stand with Ukraine until it triumphs over Russia’s aggression.”

The president said that the United States will “continue to work tirelessly” to back Ukraine against Russian forces in the ongoing war.

Ukraine’s air force said that the early morning attack by Russia using 78 air and ground missiles and 106 Shahed drones damaged critical equipment in Ukraine’s power grid, causing outages on Christmas Day.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decried the deliberate attack on Christmas day as “inhumane.”

Ukraine shot down “more than 50 missiles and a significant number of drones” and was still hit as there are power outages in a number of regions as engineers are trying to restore power, Zelenskyy said.

“Russian evil will not break Ukraine and will not spoil Christmas,” Zelenskyy said.

The strikes wounded at least six people in the northeastern city of Kharkiv and killed one in the region of Dnipropetrovsk, the governors there said.

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CNN’s Abby Phillip Gets Schooled by Rep. Lawler as He Shuts Down Her Claim That Deporting Illegals Is ‘Too Expensive’

CNN host Abby Phillip seemed more concerned with the cost of deporting illegal immigrants than the devastating financial and social toll their unchecked influx is already imposing on American taxpayers.

During an exchange with Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), Phillip’s attempt to question the feasibility of deportation efforts was met with a brutal dose of reality.

Phillip smugly suggested that deporting illegal immigrants might be too expensive, quipping that Homan “doesn’t seem to have a sense of the scope—what it’s going to take, what it’s going to cost.”

But Lawler, armed with cold, hard facts, quickly set the record straight, exposing the absurdity of Phillip’s argument.

Lawler brought up the tragic human cost of sanctuary policies, recounting a horrifying incident where a criminal alien—previously deported by the Trump administration but allowed back into the country by the Biden regime—committed an unthinkable act of violence by burning a woman alive on a subway.

He slammed sanctuary states and cities like New York for enabling such heinous crimes by refusing to cooperate with federal immigration law.

And it’s not just public safety that’s at stake—it’s the livelihoods of hardworking Americans. Lawler pointed out the hypocrisy of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who burdens her state’s citizens with a $2,500 congestion pricing fee while simultaneously funneling taxpayer dollars into free services for illegal immigrants.

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Black Money, Black Flags: How USAID Paved the Way for Syria’s Militant Takeover

As the designated terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) establishes its proto-government in Idlib, notoriously corrupt NGOs are stepping in to fill the gaps in public services, with some even defecting to work alongside the group.

The United States, which spent two decades and $5.4 trillion overthrowing governments hostile to al-Qaeda, now finds itself in a paradoxical position. Modern al-Qaeda has carved out its own quasi-state in Syria, yet remains on the U.S. list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. To characterize this as a foreign policy misstep would be reductive; the U.S. has actively facilitated HTS’s conquest of parts of Syria while maintaining its official terrorist designation.

For the past five years, HTS, an al-Qaeda offshoot, has sought to rehabilitate its image. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani—a former high-ranking member of both ISIS and al-Qaeda—has led a calculated charm offensive, attempting to rebrand the group from one focused on violence and minority persecution to a more palatable local governance entity.

Since establishing HTS and a proto-government called the Syrian Salvation Government, or SSG, the group’s leader, al-Jolani has expended a good deal of energy talking about topics intended to normalize the idea of a-Qaeda’s statehood; things like ‘institutions,’ and ‘structures.’ This, coupled with al-Jolani’s sudden embrace of Syria’s diverse tapestry of minority groups, has made up the main pillars of the terror group’s rebrand. Al-Jolani himself credits the establishment of quasi-state structures for the group’s sudden success in taking over Syria.

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Tennessee Officials Will Pay $735,000 To Settle Lawsuit Over Seizure Of Legal Hemp Products

The state of Tennessee and the city of Spring Hill will jointly pay two businesses $735,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging state and local law enforcement wrongfully seized 231 pounds of legal hemp products earlier this year, according to a statement from an attorney representing the businesses.

The settlement follows the Spring Hill police department’s seizure of legal hemp products from Old School Vapor and SAK Wholesale in Columbia, Tennessee last May.

Days later, the businesses filed a federal suit seeking the return of products they said were valued at $1.35 million. The lawsuit named Spring Hill Police Chief Don Brit and 11 other officers and employees of the local district attorney’s office, including District Attorney Brent Cooper, whom—the lawsuit claims—articulated the position that legal hemp was “the same damn thing” as marijuana.

Hemp is distinguished from marijuana under federal and state law based on the concentration of a compound known as delta-9 THC. Hemp products with a concentration of less than .3 percent delta-9 THC are legal to sell, buy and consume in Tennessee—and federally. Cannabis with concentrations greater than .3 percent is classified as marijuana and is illegal in Tennessee.

The appearance of hemp flowers and marijuana are virtually indistinguishable, requiring laboratory testing to differentiate legal from illegal substances.

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