Tag Archives: Internal Revenue Service

An Idea That Is Long Overdue

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One of the problems with the amount of illegal immigration America has seen in recent years is the fact that people who are here illegally and have no right to work get paid outside the Social Security and tax systems and send much of their earnings back to their home country. This takes a serious amount of money out of the American economy.

On Sunday, Zero Hedge reported:

The Internal Revenue Service and the Department of the Treasury proposed regulations on Friday regarding the new excise tax, established under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, on certain remittances made abroad.

“Beginning Jan. 1, 2026, a 1 percent remittance transfer tax applies to remittances sent from the United States to recipients in foreign countries when the sender provides cash, a money order, a cashier’s check, or other similar physical instrument to the remittance transfer provider,” the IRS said in an April 10 statement.

“The sender is liable for the tax, and remittance transfer providers are required to collect the remittance transfer tax from certain senders, make semimonthly deposits, and file quarterly returns with the IRS. If the remittance transfer provider does not collect the tax from the sender, the tax becomes a liability of the remittance transfer provider.”

The proposed regulations clarify how the remittance transfer tax would be applied.

According to the notice of the proposed rule, the remittance tax is applicable to all eligible transfers irrespective of whether the amount is actually disbursed to the designated recipient.

In case a remittance transfer expires or is canceled and the remittance transfer provider refunds the amount to the sender, the sender can recoup the tax by filing a claim for refund with the IRS.

The tax does not apply to any remittance transfer in which the funds come from a credit or debit card issued in the United States. It is also inapplicable if the funds being sent are withdrawn from an account held in a financial institution.

Any amount that is ultimately transferred to a designated recipient will be taxed, the notice clarified.

The rules affect remittance transfer providers, such as credit unions, banks, and money services businesses, as well as their agents.

The article notes:

Between 2019 and 2024, money transfers to domestic and foreign destinations via money services businesses increased from $1.3 to $4 trillion.

“Money transmitted to foreign destinations (remittance transfers) accounted for 9 to 25 percent of the total money transmissions, equaling $236 billion in 2019, growing to almost $1 trillion in 2021 and 2022, but decreasing to $365 billion in 2024,” the notice said.

“Over 2019–2024, annual remittance transfers to foreign destinations through [money service businesses] averaged $520 billion. The average individual money transfer size ranged from $290 to $740 over the same time period.”

In 2024, President Trump essentially closed the border. Please follow the link above to read the entire article. We are talking about a considerable sum of money.

Rewarding The Hand That Feeds You

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There are people in America who will vote for Kamala Harris for many reasons–the idea of a woman President, the idea of a mixed-race President, and the idea that a Harris presidency will provide free money for a lot of people.

On Thursday, mrctv reported the following:

The union that represents the nation’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents announced Wednesday that it is endorsing Democrat Kamala Harris for president in this year’s election.

Vice President Harris has played a role in “one of the most pro-labor administrations in history,” the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) explained in a press release announcing its decision:

“The administration also delivered agency budgets that provide federal employees with additional staffing and resources, including significant new investments to rebuild the IRS under the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Indeed, the Inflation Reduction Act, for which Harris cast the deciding vote to break a Senate deadlock, boosts the IRS budget by $80 billion, enabling the agency to hire an additional 87,000 employees – while increasing the union’s membership in the process.

However, the IRS expansion won’t just increase union membership, it’ll also help the agency to collect an additional $5 trillion of tax increases Harris wants, analysis by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) finds:

“Harris-proposed tax increases will kill jobs in the private sector but create jobs for IRS agents.

“Agents certainly appreciate her call to make the IRS even larger and more powerful if she wins the presidency. Agents will be hired and deployed to implement the $5 trillion of tax increases Harris wishes to impose over the next decade.”

ATR research also found that 97% of political contributions by the IRS agents’ union went to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle. In all, the union gave $635,170 to Democrats during that election cycle.

Nothing like supporting your local IRS agent.

IRS Audits For Thee, But Not For Me

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On Friday, The Federalist posted an article about how the extra money given to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the last budget passed by Congress is being used.

The article reports:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is using a new army of tax collectors to conduct mass audits of middle-income earners after Democrats promised additional resources would only be used to target the rich.

On Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., celebrated the federal government’s collection of more than $1 billion in taxes from “high-wealth taxpayers” as a triumph for the agency’s radical expansion under President Joe Biden.

…A columnist for the paper trumpeted by Warren, however, pointed out that “Buried deep in the same story: Two-thirds of IRS audits initiated last year were on taxpayers making less than $200,000.”

The article notes:

“It should also be noted that nearly two-thirds of audits initiated in 2023 were on those making less than $200,000,” Brady told the paper.

In April, The Wall Street Journal editorial board reported on a review of the federal tax agency’s auditing practices, which found 63 percent of new government inquiries were to middle-income earners who made less than $200,000.

“Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million,” wrote the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. “Don’t forget to save those charitable-giving receipts.”

It has been reported that nearly half of American Congress members are millionaires. Why would the people who write the laws write them so that their activities would be closely watched?

When Radical Isn’t Radical–It’s Original

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I am not an economist, but I am an observer of the obvious.

In a recent speech, President Trump talked about ending the Income Tax and restructuring the Federal Reserve. Either or both of those things would be good for all Americans and for the American economy.

Before 1913, the United State had neither the Federal Reserve nor the Income Tax. Both measures were passed in 1913. On February 25, 1913, the 16th Amendment (Income Tax) was certified as part of the U.S. Constitution. On December 23, 1913, the Federal Reserve Act created the Federal Reserve.

The men who met at Jekyll Island to create the Federal Reserve represented 25 percent of the wealth of the entire world. They met in secret, and their identities were concealed for many years afterward. Their goal was to keep that 25 percent of wealth in their hands. They created the system for the purpose of keeping New York City banks as the center of America’s wealth. The federal reserve created a system where money could be created out of nothing and loaned out through a leverage system to create interest. For example, over a 30-year mortgage, a bank can earn more from the sale of a house than any contractor who worked on the house.

The Income Tax was supposed to only impact the top 1 percent of Americans. Before 1913, the government’s expenses had been handled through tariffs.

To end the Income Tax, you would have to end the Welfare State. One way to do that would be to tax welfare benefits but not wages. When it becomes more lucrative to work than to collect welfare, it is possible that the work ethic that used to be part of American culture might be revived. You would also have to slash the bloated bureaucracy. The economic boom created by ending the Income Tax would give those who lose their jobs in government a great job market in which to search for new jobs. We need to get rid of any government department that is not successful–has education improved since the Department of Education was created? What has Housing and Urban Development accomplished? How many people in the Justice Department would have to be fired to end the corruption? You no longer need the Internal Revenue Service. You see where I am going with this.

The opposition to this plan would come from federal workers (fear of losing their jobs). Opposition would also come from Washington swamp creatures who would see it as a threat to their power (in Washington controlling money is power). It would also come from welfare recipients.

The other issue would be Social Security and its related taxes. That could be worked out easily by balancing payments to people who have paid into the program for more than forty years with alternatives for younger workers. With a retirement age of 70, most Americans pay the most into Social Security from about the age of 30.

This is all possible if Americans are willing to elect a businessman who has the economic knowledge to put it all together.

Imagine a world where you get to keep all of what you earn and the government cannot intimidate you about your taxes.

The Government’s Misplace Priorities

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On Friday, The Epoch Times posted an article about some changes being made to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The article reports:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to raise its enforcement personnel by 40 percent by the end of this fiscal year, with revenue agents seeing the largest workforce increase.

For fiscal year 2024, the IRS plans to boost enforcement staff by a net 5,462 employees, according to a Jan. 29 report by IRS watchdog Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). This would take the total number of enforcement personnel at the tax agency to 18,960 by the end of fiscal 2024, which is 40 percent higher than the staffing at the beginning of October 2023.

Out of the 5,462 net additions, 4,704 will be revenue agents who are tasked with conducting “face-to-face audits of more complex returns.”

The tax agency intends to add a net 493 special agents for the year, who are armed officials investigating “potential criminal activities.” Staffing of revenue officers will rise by 265 employees. Revenue officers are tasked with collecting delinquent taxes and securing delinquent returns.

First of all, I do not believe that IRS agents should be armed. Secondly, the idea of an apolitical IRS went out the window when Lois Lerner decided to target conservative groups to delay their 501c3 tax status requests.

The article notes:

By fiscal 2024-end, revenue agents will comprise close to 70 percent of the enforcement personnel. Armed special agents will make up 13.5 percent and revenue officers will account for 16.4 percent.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided the IRS with $79.4 billion in supplemental funding that is available for the agency until September 2031. By the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2023, the agency had used $3.5 billion of the funds.

As long as we are arming federal employees, let’s send them to our southern border to enforce our immigration laws.

Israel Aid?

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On Thursday, The Daily Wire posted two articles relating to American aid to Israel.

The first article reported:

Twelve House Democrats joined with Republicans on Thursday to pass a White House-opposed plan offset $14.3 billion in aid for Israel by slashing the same amount of funds meant for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The GOP measure to provide emergency aid to Israel as it fights Hamas passed by a 226-196 vote, sending the legislation to the Democrat-led Senate where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has already vowed not to bring it up for consideration.

Instead, Schumer announced earlier in the day, the Senate would “work on our own bipartisan emergency aid package that includes funding for aid to Israel, Ukraine, humanitarian aid including for Gaza, and competition with the Chinese Government.”

But the passage of the GOP House plan has already proven to be bipartisan with a dozen Democrats voting in favor of it: Reps. Angie Craig (D-MN), Don Davis (D-NC), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Jared Golden (D-ME), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Greg Landsman (D-OH), Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Darren Soto (D-FL), Haley Stevens (D-MI), Juan Vargas (D-CA), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), and Frederica Wilson (D-FL).

The second article reported on Senator Schumer’s reaction to the bill:

The Democrat-controlled Senate will refuse to consider the House GOP plan to send aid to Israel in its fight against Hamas, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced on Thursday, setting up a standoff with the Republican-led lower chamber.

Opting for a different path, Schumer said the Senate will move forward by working on legislation that combines Israel assistance with other national security matters — a strategy rejected by House conservatives, but favored by the Biden administration.

“Let me be clear: The Senate will not take up the House GOP’s deeply flawed proposal,” Schumer said in a post to X. “Instead we will work on our own bipartisan emergency aid package that includes funding for aid to Israel, Ukraine, humanitarian aid including for Gaza, and competition with the Chinese Government.”

The Democrats are allergic to spending cuts. Because of that, it is questionable whether any American aid will reach Israel. However, I suspect the Democrats will find a way to send more money to Ukraine. Maybe it’s not really about the spending cuts.

A Police State?

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Matt Taibbi is a journalist who has been reporting on the Twitter files released by Elon Musk. Matt Taibbi is not a conservative and is considered an objective journalist. As anyone who has followed the story is aware, the Twitter files show a lot of illegal activity in the collaboration between Twitter and a number of government agencies. Obviously, the deep state is not happy about this information being revealed to the public. Telling the truth has consequences.

On Monday, The Gateway Pundit reported:

An IRS agent showed up at the home of ‘Twitter Files’ journalist Matt Taibbi on the same day he testified before Jim Jordan’s Committee on Weaponization of the Federal Government.

How convenient.

On March 9, Matt Taibbi dropped a Twitter Files ahead of his testimony to Congress: THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger appeared before Congress later that day.

The FTC had already been harassing Elon Musk and demanding he “identify all journalists” granted access to the Twitter files.

The article notes:

The IRS agent just showed up to the journalist’s home unannounced!

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Monday to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seeking an explanation for why journalist Matt Taibbi received an unannounced home visit from an IRS agent. We’ve seen the letter, and both the circumstances and timing of the IRS focus on this journalist raise serious questions.

The article concludes:

Mr. Taibbi has provided the committee with documentation showing his 2018 return had been electronically accepted, and he says the IRS never notified him or his accountants of a problem after he filed that 2018 return more than four-and-a-half years ago.

He says the IRS initially rejected his 2021 return, which he later refiled, and it was rejected again—even though Mr. Taibbi says his accountants refiled it with an IRS-provided pin number. Mr. Taibbi notes that in neither case was the issue “monetary,” and that the IRS owes him a “considerable” sum.

There is a desperate need to clean house in Washington.

 

 

Is Anyone Surprised?

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Stacey Abrams has turned losing an election into a profitable venture. When she is not writing steamy romance novels, she is generally creating havoc in the State of Georgia.

On Thursday, The Washington Examiner reported:

Experts are calling for an investigation into a Stacey Abrams-founded charity over a large financial discrepancy.

The New Georgia Project, a minority-focused democracy advocacy group founded in 2013, was run by Nse Ufot, hand-picked by Abrams, until she was fired in October. The group filed its 2021 Form 990 financial disclosure three months later, when the form was two months overdue, an investigation by the Washington Free Beacon found. The group reported a $533,846 consulting payment and $67,500 grant to an obscure charity called the Black Male Initiative, run by Ufot’s brother. However, the group claims it never received any such payment.

The group provided its Internal Revenue Service filings to the outlet, which show $0 in consulting fees and just $255,000 from all sources.

The article concludes:

“New Georgia Project’s recent tax returns leave so many questions, it’s difficult to know where to even begin trying to understand these important documents,” Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of the charity watchdog Americans for Public Trust, told the outlet. “Filing a fraudulent return with the IRS carries hefty penalties, and any evidence of financial malfeasance should be taken seriously.”

The New Georgia Project has played a leading role in Abrams’s attempts to turn Georgia blue by mobilizing minority voters.

“New Georgia Project is a nonpartisan effort to register, civically engage, and build power with the New Georgia Majority — the large and growing population of Black, brown, young, and other historically marginalized voters in the Peach State,” its website reads.

The New Georgia Project has a noble cause. Voter registration is important. I might emphasize that working to register all voters is a good idea. I wonder if they are registering voters in both Republican and Democrat areas.

A wise man once said, ” Be careful what charities you give your money to.” I suspect in the case of the New Georgia Project that is good advice.

Targeting The People Who Can Least Afford It

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On February 8, Hot Air posted an article about the Biden administration’s plan to crack down on unreported tips.

The article reports:

Remember when we were told that the army of new IRS agents Biden wants to hire was only going to go after billionaires? Good times. If that’s the case, somebody should check to see if Bill Gates and Elon Musk have taken some side gigs slinging hash at a diner somewhere. (Of course, in Musk’s case it may come to that if he can’t get 10 million more people to sign up for Twitter Blue.) As it turns out, the Tax Man is launching a new program to crack down on tips received by wait staff in the food and beverage industry. That’s right. The IRS thinks that waiters and waitresses are pocketing too much money in gratuities, and Uncle Sam plans on getting his piece of the action. (Fox News).

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) proposed a revenue procedure this week cracking down on service industry’s reporting of tips.

The so-called Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program would be a voluntary tip reporting system in which the IRS and service industry companies cooperate, according to the announcement Monday. As part of the proposal, the IRS will give the public until early May to provide feedback on the program before implementing it.

“Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich…” Mike Palicz, the federal affairs manager at Americans for Tax Reform, tweeted. “They’re coming after waitresses’ tips now.”

The article concludes:

The whole concept of an “income tax” is based on the compensation a person is paid by their employer. The wait staff’s tips shouldn’t be taxed at all because the patrons are not their employers and are under no obligation to tip them. It’s really more of a gift given in appreciation for good service.

But that probably won’t stop the IRS from doing this. And it’s policies like these that have made me develop a habit of always tipping in cash when we dine out, even if we pay for the meal with a debit card. I tend to be a bit of an exorbitant tipper (at least according to my wife) but regular customers who tip well generally wind up getting much better service in my experience. And I enjoy the looks on the faces of hard-working servers when they find some twenty-dollar bills that they can just stick in their pockets waiting for them. As far as I’m concerned, owners of bars and restaurants should tell the IRS to keep its nose out of their employees’ tips.

At some point, I wish the government would realize that what people earn is theirs and the government actually has no right to any of it. If the spending habits of our government were a bit more sane, some of us might not mind paying the ridiculous taxes that we pay. Right now–in
America–taxpayers pay more money to the government than the Midievil surfs did to the lords of the manor. That is not acceptable.

Following The Money

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Money does not always determine the outcome of an election (see the presidential election of 2016), but in many cases, large amounts of money can make a difference. Name recognition is important in an election, and being able to purchase ads to answer false charges against an opponent is also important. The mid-term elections are crucial for the Democrats–if enough Republicans win who care about government integrity, the Democrats may not be able to survive the investigations that follow. So the Democrats need lots of money from various sources.

On Tuesday, The Washington Examiner posted the following headline, “Fake charities are spending millions to help Democrats win elections.”

The article reports:

In fact, what the IRS isn’t doing in the nonprofit (or “public charity”) sector will affect the midterm elections far more than any FBI raid ever could.

A big part of the IRS’s job is the oversight of 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that are awarded tax-exempt status because of the beneficial work they do. There are many different rules that 501(c)(3) nonprofit groups must follow to maintain their favored status, but the most important is that 501(c)(3)s are forbidden to engage in partisan electioneering, or efforts to aid political candidates and affect the results of elections, in any way.

Advocacy and political bias are allowed, but elections are strictly off-limits.

Enter fake charities such as the Voter Participation Center, State Voices, and the Voter Registration Project that siphon tens of millions of dollars every year from billionaires and their charitable foundations to use in ways that the IRS strictly forbids. By abusing their knowledge of racial demographic voting trends and enormous microtargeted voter databases, these groups can ensure they only register people likely to vote for Democrats and function as tax-exempt Democratic PACs.

The partisanship of these “civic participation” nonprofit groups has been an open secret for decades.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is the best and earliest example — and the one most people know. During the 2008 election cycle, ACORN harvested voter registration forms from over 1.3 million people, and the organization crumbled after numerous ACORN activists were investigated and charged with forgery, fraud, and bribery related to voter registration work.

Later, in the 2012 book The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, liberal journalist Sasha Isenberg wrote of the Voter Participation Center (which raised $88 million in 2020): “Even though the group was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats.”

Remember Lois Lerner, director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), who was the central figure in the 2013 IRS targeting controversy. The IRS denied conservative groups tax-exempt status outright or delayed that status until they could no longer take effective part in the 2012 election.  The Democrats have always understood the value of politically-aligned groups. It’s time all of those groups were recognized for what they are so that the public can make informed decisions.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. What has happened to our elections in recent years may result in the end of our representative republic as we know it.

When You Don’t Deal With A Lawbreaker…

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On Tuesday, Townhall reported that the Biden administration has chosen the person to lead the new, expanded Internal Revenue Service.

The article reports:

As the Biden administration continues its attempts to consolidate power within the federal government and among its leftist allies, there’s a familiar face being tapped to lead Biden’s effort to surge power, resources, and agents to the IRS — and she has quite the track record of working to target conservative groups and organizations. 

One of Lois Lerner’s lackeys from the Obama-era IRS scandal — one that saw the agency target conservative and tea party affiliated groups as a political arm of the Obama-Biden administration — will be leading the Biden administration’s expansion of the IRS and stated goal of hiring 87,000 new agents.

Nikole Flax, who most recently served as the deputy commissioner in charge of the IRS’ Large Business & International Division, has been with the IRS since 2008. According to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, Flax will be leading “the creation of a new, centralized office for implementation of all IRS-related provisions” outlined in the boondoggle falsely named the “Inflation Reduction Act.” There’s little Democrats love more than a chance to work on “centralized” anything within the federal government. 

I wonder if the IRS will be used to squelch conservative speech before the mid-terms and before the 2024 presidential election.

The article notes:

Once the IRS was caught in its scheme of treating conservatives disparately from liberal organizations, Flax was one of several senior IRS officials who had their emails conveniently get “lost,” along with Lerner’s, as Katie reported in 2014. “One of those officials is former chief of staff to former Acting Commissioner Steven Miller, Nikole Flax,” Katie also noted. “The ‘lost’ emails fall during the time period when ‘the Washington, DC office wrote and directed the Cincinnati field office to send abusive questionnaires, including inappropriate demands for donor information, to conservative groups,” according to the House Ways and Means Committee.”

Somehow in Washington, the excuse ‘the dog ate my emails’ is accepted.

The article concludes:

As a refresher, the emails that *were* recovered from Lerner and other high-ranking officials included explanations of their main goal in going after conservatives and tea party groups: “One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn’t feel so comfortable doing stuff,” Lerner wrote.

Flax also, as Katie reported here, “visited the White House 35 times after talking with former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner about working to criminally prosecute conservative tea party groups for ‘lying’ about political activity.” What was Flax doing at the White House? Who did she talk to? Was she reporting progress or taking orders? All that’s known is that Flax will again now have a leading role within the IRS as the Biden administration steps up its attacks on conservatives by labeling vast swaths of Americans as fascists.

A Facebook friend who does excellent research points out:

Nikole Flax was the pointPERSON in the Obama program to target conservative businesses. When it was discovered that they broke the law in specifically targeting opposition, the inspector general sent Flax instructions to deliver her computer to his office for inspection.
She miraculously had a hard drive crash that very instant and, notwithstanding the incredible amount of computer geeks at the FBI, no one was ever able to recover a single bit of information from her hard drive. Imagine that.
She was never prosecuted for abuse of power, obstruction of justice, or destruction of evidence.
Instead, China Joe has appointed her to head the IRS Central Office controlling the audits for the 87,000 new agents as well as its existing auditors. The White House did not disclose whether she gets one of the new AR-15s and some high-capacity magazines the IRS recently purchased.
Do you really think they are going to enforce the law equally?
Not since Vladimir Putin has an evil person in government been given so much power.

Stay tuned (and make sure you are current on alternative news sources)!

What Was This About?

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On Tuesday I posted an article that I had serious doubts about posting. I posted it anyway because it was true. I was hoping it wasn’t true, but history has a way of repeating itself. Please keep that article in mind while reading the following.

On Wednesday, Townhall posted the following:

IRS Job Page Removed After Alarming Description of the Special Agent Position Got Exposed

Numerous people on the internet took screenshots of the job page before it was removed.

Here is one of those screenshots:

The article at Townhall concludes:

Excuse me? The link got taken down, but given what has transpired at the IRS, the FBI, and the DOJ—it sure looks like the organs of the state are mustering for armed confrontation with the Left’s political enemies. Let’s not forget that the IRS got busted for targeting conservative non-profits in 2013. The recent spending bill passed by Senate Democrats aims to appropriate $80 billion to the IRS, which even former commissioners admit won’t be spent efficiently, but it will add another 87,000 employees to the agency to apparently go on search and destroy missions if we don’t pay our taxes.

We all remember Lois Lerner who targeted conservative groups and has now happily retired with her pension. This is one agency that does not need to add additional personal nor does it need to be armed.

Thank God for the alert Internet users who found the ad and shared it.

 

 

This Is Probably A Done Deal

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Now that Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has agreed to vote for it, the Inflation Reduction Act will probably pass the Senate and become law. That is not good news for Americans.

The Conservative Treehouse points out some of the changes that were made to the law to get Senator Sinema to agree to vote for it:

Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has announced her support for the senate climate change spending and tax proposal after some modifications to the new taxation.

To support the hedge fund donors, Senator Sinema insisted the carried interest loophole tax provision be removed and instead replaced with a corporate tax on stock buybacks.  Any time a corporation wants to buy back their own shares of stock, they will now pay the U.S. government a tax for doing so; at least that’s the ¹intent.

[¹Note: taxing shares of company stock will never work, because that’s exactly what shell companies were designed to avoid. Set up a child shell company to purchase the stock and the parent company doesn’t pay taxes on the child’s purchase. It’s a shell game]

Additionally, according to reports, there is some kind of agreement to modify the 15% corporate minimum tax. Details unknown. Bottom line, Senator Sinema now supports the $700 billion climate change spending and tax proposal.

The Tax Foundation has an analysis of exactly what the financial impact of the bill will be:

Last-week’s Democrat-sponsored Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), successor to the House-passed Build Back Better Act of late 2021, has been touted by President Biden to, among other things, help reduce the country’s crippling inflation. Using the Tax Foundation’s General Equilibrium Model, we estimate that the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce long-run economic output by about 0.1 percent and eliminate about 30,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the United States. It would also reduce average after-tax incomes for taxpayers across every income quintile over the long run.

By reducing long-run economic growth, this bill may actually worsen inflation by constraining the productive capacity of the economy.

Our analysis contains estimates of the budgetary, economic, and distributional impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act as specified in bill text provided on July 27.

Using the General Equilibrium Model, we estimate that the tax provisions, IRS enforcement, and drug pricing provisions in the bill would increase federal revenues by about $656 billion over the budget window, before accounting for $352 billion in expanded tax credits for individuals and businesses, resulting in a net revenue increase of about $304 billion from 2022 to 2031.

Excluding the anticipated revenue from increased tax compliance and the drug pricing provisions, the bill would lose about $126 billion in revenue over the budget window.

The article includes the following chart:

The bill also includes almost $80 billion in appropriations for the Internal Revenue Service to put toward taxpayer services and enforcement. I suspect those of us in the middle class will feel that change. Even if your taxes are done correctly to the penny, the IRS can make you very uncomfortable. My husband and I experienced that after we donated to the tea party. The next year we were audited. We sent them all the applicable information, and they delayed the case for a year. They couldn’t find anything wrong, but they took a long time admitting that. The IRS does not need more money–it needs to go away and have our tax code replaced by something that people can understand and can fit on one sheet of paper.

 

 

Is There Anyone In Government Who Cares About The Taxpayers’ Money?

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On Saturday, Just the News posted an article about the Internal Revenue Service’s issuance of improper pandemic tax credits.

The article reports:

This week’s Golden Horseshoe is awarded to the IRS for issuing almost $1 billion in improper pandemic tax credits — and rebuffing an inspector general’s recommendations to recover the erroneous payments.

The tax collectors issued potentially $898 million in improper Recovery Rebate Credits (RRCs) to ineligible individuals, including potential nonresident aliens, according to a final audit report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

The CARES Act authorized Economic Impact Payments in varying amounts depending on income and filing status. Any eligible individual who did not receive the stimulus payment could claim the missing amount on their tax return as an RRC on their taxes in 2020 and 2021.

“As of May 27, 2021, the IRS had processed 26.3 million tax returns with RRC claims totaling $39.2 billion,” according to the TIGTA final audit report. “Of these, the IRS issued potentially improper RRC payments totaling $898 million. These include $79.8 million in the RRC that should have been paid to eligible individuals and $818.5 million in the RRC that was paid to ineligible individuals.”   

The IRS declined to review or take steps to recover approximately two-thirds of the erroneously disbursed amounts, the inspector general revealed.

…Declining to review such ineligible claims processed after May 27, 2021, Corbin said the recovery effort “would require the IRS to divert limited resources to review these returns when such a small percentage, five one-hundredths of one percent, are projected to be affected by the issue.”

Democrats increased the IRS budget by 6% in the recent omnibus spending legislation, and an additional 10,000 agents were expected to be hired. 

How much money would taxpayers save if the additional agents were put to work tracking down erroneous pandemic payments rather than harassing ordinary Americans who might have made an honest mistake on their tax returns?

The Role Of The Internal Revenue Service In Elections

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On Sunday, The American Thinker posted an article about the role the Internal Revenue Service has played in American elections.

The article notes:

Should the projections of a Republican tsunami at the midterms prove true, there are so many things that a Republican Congress must prioritize. Not the least of which is revising the civil-service laws to permit removing incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats, cutting drastically the federal bureaucracy, and reforming, among other agencies, the CDC, NIH, FBI, and the IRS.

I’m focusing now on the IRS, which first hit my radar screen when with no consequences whatsoever.  Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice declined to press criminal charges against Lois Lerner, whose outfit delayed and denied the Tea Party reform groups the tax-exempt status to which they were entitled, hamstringing them against the very well-financed (probably including illegal funds from abroad) Obama crowd. 

This time, pay attention to Black Lives Matter, an utterly corrupt outfit whose riots and lootings destroyed so many cities and wreaked havoc on the black communities and their businesses.

The damage continues to this day as the riots fueled the defund police movement, a ridiculous effort that leaves the poor and the black communities particularly vulnerable to violent crime, and as another consequence caused an exodus of needed businesses from those places.

On her own, the mayor of D.C. ordered one street painted in huge letters “Black Lives Matter.” School kids were urged to walk out to support the group, while big corporations sent them money. All told, the group reportedly raised $90 million in 2020.

The article concludes:

While the IRS makes it harder for you to get your refunds, Black Lives Matter is not the only sketchy Democrat-controlled election-rigging outfit whose tax-exempt status the IRS has not looked into. David Horowitz and John Perazzo detail how Mark Zuckerberg funneled $419.5 million to tax-exempt outfits (Center for Election Innovation and Research and the “Safe Elections” Project of the Center for Technology and Civic Life through yet a third tax-exempt outfit, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.)

The purpose of these grants was obvious — it was to tip the scales for the Democrats in the 2020 election despite the fact that such tax-exempt foundations are “barred from contributing their resources to election campaigns.”

The grants to these two outfits and the ways they used them to tip the election for Biden are well laid out in this article. 

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity.

The existence of such a regulation is meaningless, however, if it is not enforced. Consequently, this ban on campaign activities by “charitable” organizations didn’t daunt Facebook billionaire and Democrat Party patron Mark Zuckerberg and his wife when they plotted a massive campaign to swing the 2020 presidential election in favor of the Democrat, Joe Biden.

The Facebook couple donated to two left-wing tax-exempt foundations “with the intention of tipping the result to Biden by launching “get-out-the-vote” campaigns focused on Democrat precincts in battleground states.” And they achieved that purpose.

The authors contend that none of these travesties could have taken place “without the seditious collusion of I.R.S. Commissioner Charles Rettig and his 63,000 agents“ who neglect their duty to protect our tax laws and elections.

I find their argument compelling. On the one hand, they tied the hands of the Tea Party, on the other, they put on blinders to the patent corruption of the BLM and Zuckerberg-funded outfits.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. If we don’t vote the current crooks (in both parties) out of office in November, I fear we will lose our country.

When The Numbers Do Not Align With The Words

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On Sunday, The Blaze posted an article about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. At the time the tax cut was passed, Democrats loudly professed that the bill was only ‘tax cuts for the rich.’ The article illustrates the fallacy of that claim by reporting actual numbers. You can follow the link above to the article to read some of the ridiculous claims made by Democrat leaders.

After detailing some of the claims made by leading Democrats, the article reports:

However, new analysis shows the Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts benefited middle-income and working-class Americans the most. The Heartland Institute — a free-market think tank — analyzed data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The analysis declared that assertions made by Democrats about the GOP’s tax cut law were incorrect.

The Heartland Institute examined IRS data from 2017 to 2018, the first year the tax cuts went into effect.

“The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced average effective income tax rates for filers in every one of the IRS’s income brackets, with the largest benefits going to lower- and middle-income households,” the report stated.

“For example, after accounting for all tax deductions and credits, filers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $40,000 to $50,000 received an average tax cut of 18.2 percent,” the Heartland Institute said.

“The IRS data further show that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act appeared to have a strong upward effect on economic mobility,” the report noted. “The number of filers with an adjusted gross income of $1 to $25,000 decreased by more than 2 million in just one year, while the number of households reporting incomes higher than $25,000 increased in every income bracket.”

The article concludes:

The Heartland Institute concluded, “The available evidence is clear: Based on tax data from 2017 and 2018, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced taxes for the vast majority of filers, led to substantial improvements in upward economic mobility, and disproportionately benefited working- and middle-class households, many of which experienced tax cuts topping 18 percent to 20 percent.”

Contrast the above with one of the provisions in The Build Back Better Bill. That bill will raise the SALT (state and local tax) deduction to $80,000. That means that you can deduct up to $80,000 in state and local taxes from your federal income tax. The tax plan instituted under President Trump limited that deduction to $10,000. Do you honestly know any middle class Americans who pay $80,000 in state and local taxes? Raising the SALT tax limit to $80,000 is indeed a tax cut for the rich.

This Really Isn’t A Surprise

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Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about President Biden’s spending plans.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden’s administration is facing a daunting reality check after claiming for months that their spending agenda will “cost zero dollars,” with the head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) saying the White House drastically overestimated the revenue the IRS could gain by cracking down on tax loopholes.

Biden and numerous other senior Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill have repeatedly insisted that their $1.85 trillion social spending package will add nothing to the national debt. They argued the package included enough pay-fors to offset the spending programs. CBO chief Phillip Swagel brought that claim down on Monday, however, saying that the tax loophole crackdown in the bill would only garner $120 billion, a far cry from the White House’s projected $400 billion, according to The New York Times.

Why didn’t these numbers come out before they voted on the Infrastructure Bill?

The article notes:

The CBO, which is a non-partisan organization, is set to release its official report Friday. The White House is shoring up support and urging lawmakers to disregard the report ahead of its release.

“In this one case, I think we’ve made a very strong empirical case for CBO not having an accurate score,” Ben Harris, assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, told the NYT. “The question is would they rather go with CBO knowing CBO is wrong, or would they want to target the best information they could possibly have?”

Why do we have the CBO if lawmakers are going to disregard their research? Again, why didn’t the lawmakers wait for the report before they voted on the spending?

A New Tax Proposal

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The Democrats are currently floating the idea of taxing unrealized capital gains. As is their usual modus operandi, the Democrats are saying that this new concept of taxation will only apply to billionaires. Of course it will.

Today The American Thinker posted an article about the idea.

Here are a few highlights from that article:

Our current secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, is busy trying to find a way to tax wealth without calling it taxing wealth.  She has eyes on taxing unrealized capital gains.  What this means simply is taxing people for money they have not earned or received.  That’s it in a nutshell.  That definition should leave even those who have never had a course in accounting or finance shaken.

Not only is Janet Yellen considering this, but the Democrat party is on board as well.  Democrats claim that it is needed in order to pay for their agenda.  You know — the one that President Biden says pays for itself.  The idea of taxing you for the income you have not made is also a policy speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi proposes.  Apparently, there is some confusion here.

Looking at this from my point of view, I recalled a picture of Casey Stengel, nicknamed “the ol’ Professor,” when he was the manager of the New York Mets in 1962 — a team considered the worst team to ever play in the major leagues.  He had his hat off and scratched his head with the caption: “Can’t anybody here play this game?“

Think about how absurd this idea is. Imagine if an Internal Revenue Agent showed up at your house and said, we decided that you have to pay tax on the money you never earned. Aside from how insane that sounds on the surface, one need only ask: “If I didn’t receive or earn that money, with what do you expect me to pay the tax?” That, in a nutshell, is the entire problem.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It describes some of the lessons we can learn from history about creative accounting. If you honestly believe that the ultra-rich will not find a way to avoid this tax so that it has to be passed down to the middle class, then you have truly not been paying attention.

Don’t Count On This To Prevent The Passage Of The Bill

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The Epoch Times posted an article today about the ongoing negotiations among the Democrats about their massive spending bill. We have been hearing for months that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will save us from this bill. It is possible that Senator Sinema will vote against it, but don’t bet money on Senator Manchin. Historically he only votes against the Democrats when it doesn’t matter.

The article reports:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has come out against a revenue scheme proposed by his party that would have allowed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to gather information on the inflows and outflows of American citizens’ bank accounts.

The measure initially came to light as a part of Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. In an attempt to head off concerns from moderates, Democratic leaders and rank-and-file lawmakers have desperately marketed the bill as being completely paid for with no substantial effect on the deficit or national debt.

…Speaking at a Tuesday meeting of the Economic Club in Washington, Manchin vehemently opposed the program.

Manchin agreed that the IRS should be somewhat strengthened. Under the reconciliation bill, insisted Manchin, “The IRS is going to be able to do the job that they’re supposed to be doing.”

But Manchin ruled that his party’s snooping scheme did not fall into the category of what the IRS should be doing. “[The IRS was] never able to go into bank accounts,” he noted.

Manchin related a conversation he’d had with President Joe Biden about the program: “I said ‘Mr. President, I don’t know who put this out or how it got screwed up but they said basically, ‘We’re gonna start looking at $600 transactions.’ Even if it’s $10,000, okay, that’s only $800 or $900 [of activity per month].”

Manchin said that he asked the president, “Do you understand how messed up that is? To think that Uncle Sam’s gonna be watching transactions?”

“I said ‘I don’t know how this happened, but this cannot happen. This is screwed up.’”

The article concludes:

The party is now considering a new tax on unrealized capital gains that would target only individuals with $1 billion or more of income per year or individuals with $100 million of income for three consecutive years. Manchin, Sinema, and other moderates have not yet given a nod of approval to this most recent measure.

BEWARE!!! Any tax levied on individuals with $1 billion or more of income will eventually be levied on individuals with $1 or more of income (because individuals with $1 billion or more of income can afford to hire the tax lawyers to avoid the tax) and the government will still want the revenue. Also taxing unrealized capital gains has never been done and is a really bad idea. What happens if those gains become losses? Do you get your tax money back? What a nightmare.

Some Good News

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NewsMax is reporting today that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has reversed its position on granting tax-exempt status to a group called “Christians Engaged.”

The article reports:

The action came after numerous Republican lawmakers rebuked the agency for overt political bias last month after it had first denied the status to Christians Engaged.

“The IRS has granted tax exempt status to Christians Engaged, a nonprofit organization that educates and empowers Christians to pray for our nation and elected officials, vote, and be civically engaged,” the conservative legal group First Liberty Institute announced in a statement.

“The reversal comes after a national backlash against the IRS’s initial rejection of Christians Engaged’s nonprofit status because, the IRS claimed, “[B]ible teachings are typically affiliated with the [Republican] party and candidates.”

Lea Patterson, counsel for the First Liberty Institute, applauded the move.

“This is truly great news for our client, as well as religious organizations and churches across America. We are grateful the IRS changed course to bring its decision into line with the Constitution and its own regulations,” she said.

Christians Engaged had appealed the IRS’ initial ruling with help from the First Liberty Institute.

When the IRS denied the tax-exempt status, they claimed that because the group followed Biblical teachings, it was too closely aligned with the Republican party. It is not the fault of any religious group that the Democrat platform does not align with Biblical teachings! The Bible is apolitical–it is God’s guide to a better life. The fact that the principles in the Bible work and may align more closely with one particular political party is totally irrelevant!

When The Cancel Culture Meets The Internal Revenue Service

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Yesterday The Epoch Times posted an article about a recent decision by the Internal Revenue Service regarding the tax-exempt status of a religious organization.

The article reports:

An IRS official denied tax-exempt status to a Texas group that encourages church members to pray for state and national leaders, regardless of their party affiliation, because it benefits “the private interests of the [Republican] Party.”

“You do not qualify as an organization described in IRS Section 501(c)(3). You engage in prohibited political campaign intervention,” wrote Stephen A. Martin, director of the IRS Office of Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements, in a May 18 letter (pdf) to Christians Engaged, the Garland, Texas-based prayer group recognized by Texas officials as tax-exempt.

“You are also not operated exclusively for one or more exempt purposes within the meaning of Section 501 (c)(3), because you operate for a substantial non-exempt private purpose and for the private interests of the D party.”

The “D party” is a reference to the Republican Party, according to a novel “legend” that Martin provided at the top of his letter to the Texas group.

The article then explains:

Martin also noted that the group’s activities “educate believers on national issues that are central to their belief in the Bible as the inerrant Word of God.

“Specifically, you educate Christians on what the Bible says in areas where they can be instrumental, including the areas of sanctity of life, the definition of marriage, biblical justice, freedom of speech, defense, and borders and immigration, U.S. and Israel relations,” he wrote.

“The Bible teachings are typically affiliated with the D party and candidates. This disqualifies you from exemption under IRS Section 501(c)(3).”

The D party in this case refers to the Republican party. This is a blatant attempt to keep Christian values (and those who hold them) out of the public discourse. It is a violation of the First Amendment rights of the group and should be treated as such.

The article includes the following:

First Liberty Institute is appealing Martin’s decision on behalf of Christians Engaged.

“The IRS states in an official letter that Biblical values are exclusively Republican. That might be news to President Joe Biden, who is often described as basing his political ideology on his religious beliefs,” First Liberty Institute counsel Lea Patterson said in the statement.

“Only a politicized IRS could see Americans who pray for their nation, vote in every election, and work to engage others in the political process as a threat. The IRS violated its own regulations in denying tax-exempt status because Christians Engaged teaches biblical values.”

The IRS believes that Biblical values are exclusively Republican. Wow. Considering the role that Biblical views played in the founding of our nation, that idea should send Americans to the polls to vote for Republicans. Stay tuned. I suspect we haven’t heard the last of this.

Fudging The Numbers (As Usual)

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Townhall posted an article today about President Biden’s plan to pay for his massive spending programs. He plans to close the gap between what taxpayers legally owe and what the IRS actually takes in.

The article reports:

Commissioner Rettig’s testimony appeared to provide groundbreaking new information that the tax gap has reached $1 trillion, with major media outlets like the New York Times taking this statement as gospel — even though it’s nearly three times what had been previously estimated by the IRS. Rettig’s statements were soon followed by a plan from Biden to raise $780 billion over the next decade by spending $80 billion on increased enforcement.

But the context of Rettig’s statements show that it was not a new agency estimate. Rettig was asked by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) to state his “personal opinion” on the size of the tax gap, and responded by saying that “it would not be outlandish to believe” that the tax gap “could approach or possibly even exceed $1 trillion.” Note also that the IRS Commissioner made this statement while trying to secure increased agency funding.

While this statement may be interesting, to portray it as equivalent to an official IRS estimate is absurd. Less than two years ago, the IRS estimated that, after factoring in enforcement and late payments, the net tax gap was $381 billion. Clearly the gap hasn’t more than doubled in just over 18 months.

The article notes that increased funding of the Internal Revenue Service would bring in some additional revenue, but nowhere near what is needed:

The government’s official budgetary scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), does believe that some additional revenue could be raised by increasing tax enforcement spending. But the CBO estimates that increasing IRS funding by $40 billion would increase collections by just $103 billion over ten years. Based on that, the Administration’s claim that it could raise $700 billion on net is ludicrous.

The article concludes:

All of this means that closing the tax gap is not as simple as grabbing revenue the IRS thus far simply has not bothered to collect. It would cost money and would end up targeting a broad swath of taxpayers, not just the wealthiest. That means auditors combing through the lives of thousands of Americans, many of whom would be lower income. And it would probably yield far less than Americans are being led to believe.

Biden’s promises of easy revenue from tax cheats are overblown at best. While enforcing owed tax payments isn’t inherently bad, throwing more money at the problem than the IRS would know what to do with is impulsive and wasteful.

Has anyone considered that the way to cut the deficit might be to examine the budget for wasteful spending (and end earmarks again)?

Is This Part Of Our Future?

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Reparations has been discussed in political circles for a while now. So far no one has explained how to make reparations to families of slaves, but not to the families whose loved ones died freeing the slaves. Do people who weren’t here before 1860 have to pay reparations? Do people whose ancestors were indentured servants get reparations too? There are an awful lot of unanswered questions.

On April 5th, The New York Sun posted a very interesting article on reparations.

The article poses an interesting question:

Could a racial priority for getting a Covid-19 vaccine turn out to be just the first stop on the way to race-based tax rates?

A tax bill that varies depending on the taxpayer’s race might strike readers as some law professor’s remote fantasy, far from anything that might become reality.

Things are developing more quickly on this front, though, than is widely recognized.

Just this month, the governor of Vermont, Phil Scott, a Republican, attracted attention when he announced, “If you or anyone in your household identifies as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color (BIPOC), including anyone with Abenaki or other First Nations heritage, all household members who are 16 years or older can sign up to get a vaccine!”

A Reason article notes that in December 2020, while Republican Donald Trump was still president, the federal Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it would prioritize Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian veterans in vaccine distribution. Reason cites the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson as describing these schemes as unconstitutional, a violation of the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment.

The article reports:

“Prediction: By tax year 2024, Americans will be asked to indicate their race on the Form 1040,” tweeted Scott Greenberg, a former analyst at the Tax Foundation who now writes about tax policy in a Substack newsletter called “No Withholding.”

Greenberg was reacting to a tax-policy reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Richard Rubin, who had flagged the news that the Biden administration had put the Treasury department’s top tax-policy official on an “equitable data working group.”

According to the Biden executive order, “Many Federal datasets are not disaggregated by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, income, veteran status, or other key demographic variables. This lack of data has cascading effects and impedes efforts to measure and advance equity. A first step to promoting equity in Government action is to gather the data necessary to inform that effort.”

The Census provides plenty of race-based income and poverty data, but the IRS has not done so. That surprises even some savvy observers. Kai Ryssdal, of the public radio show “Marketplace,” devoted a recent segment to an interview with Dorothy Brown. A law professor at Emory, Ms. Brown is the author of “The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — And How We Can Fix It.”

Isn’t it interesting that the same Democrat party that fought so hard against civil rights legislation is still working hard to divide Americans by race. \

The article concludes:

The tax code already rewards or punishes all sorts of behaviors — home-ownership, say, or marriage and child-rearing, retirement saving, even electric-vehicle purchasing. In that context, a reparations credit seems less exceptional than it otherwise might.

There are plenty of potential downsides other than the constitutional obstacles. Yet those taxpayers who think Form 1040 is already complex enough, thank you, without adding race to the mix might want to get their arguments in order lest they find themselves, in some future tax season, in the IRS equivalent of the back of the vaccine line.

Let’s hope that if reparations through the IRS ever takes place, the Supreme Court shoots it down immediately.

This Might Be A Really Good Year To Make Sure Your Taxes Are Filed Accurately

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In November, Accounting Today posted an article reporting that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to ramp up audits of smaller businesses and their investors by about 50 percent next year, following years of persistently low examination rates, an agency official said Tuesday.

The article reports:

“The IRS is focusing our efforts to increase compliance activity in this area of not only partnerships, but also investor returns related to pass-throughs,” De Lon Harris, the IRS deputy commissioner of examination for small businesses, said at an American Institute of Certified Public Accountants event. For 2021 “we are planning for 50 percent more than we had in the previous year.”

Pass-through entities, which include partnerships, limited-liability companies and sole-proprietorships, are incredibly difficult for the IRS to audit because they frequently have complex structures that can involve dozens of inter-related entities. Pass-throughs don’t pay taxes themselves, but “pass” along the profits and tax liabilities to investors — who then pay the taxes on their individual returns.

The article concludes:

The IRS is hiring 50 more specialized auditors to work these cases, with the aim of having them in place by February, Harris said. The IRS can select returns to audit that are up to three years old. If the agency finds significant problems in a taxpayer’s filings, the auditors can examine returns that are even older.

New audit procedures that Congress approved in 2015 mean that the IRS can more easily collect any underpaid taxes it finds during the audit. Instead of having to track down each investor, the IRS can now collect the money from the partnership itself.

File your taxes carefully!

A Subtle Way To Infringe On A Constitutional Right

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“America’s 1st Freedom” is a magazine distributed by the National Rifle Association. I am not including a link to the article I am posting about because I can’t find the article electronically although it is in the April 2020 issue of the magazine.

The title of the article is “The New Gun-Control Activism.” It deals with the strategy those who oppose the right of Americans to own guns are using to limit the availability of guns to Americans.

The article notes:

Last year, for example, Connecticut State Treasurer Shawn Wooden, who commands $37 billion in public pension funds, announced plans to pull $30 million worth of shares from civilian firearm manufacturer securities. Wooden also intends to prohibit similar investments in the future and to establish incentives for banks and financial institutions to adopt anti-gun protocols. The proposition was immediately praised by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and other Connecticut politicians who view the divestment from five companies–Clarus Corp., Daicel Corp., Vista Outdoor Inc., Olin Corp., and ammunition maker Northrop Grumman–as a step toward reducing gun violence.

…Wooden also requested that financial bodies disclose their gun-related portfolios when endeavoring to wok with the treasurer’s office. Wooden subsequently selected tow firms, Citibank and Rick Financial Product (both had expressed the desire to be part of the “solution on gun violence”), to take on the roll of senior bankers in Connecticut’s then-forthcoming $890 million general obligation bond sale.

Technically I guess this is legal. It is a very subtle infringement on the Second Amendment and would be very difficult to prove in court. It is also not a new approach. During the Obama administration, the administration put in place guidelines that prevented gun dealers from getting business loans from banks.

On May 19, 2014, The New American reported:

Following the Obama administration’s “Operation Broken Trust,” an operation that began just months into his first term, the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force was created initially to “root out and expose” investment scams. After bringing 343 criminal and 189 civil cases, the task force began looking for other targets.

The task force is a gigantic interagency behemoth, involving not only the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI, but also the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. Postal Service, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the U.S. Secret Service.

The next target for the task force was credit card payment processors, such as PayPal, along with porn shops and drug paraphernalia stores. In 2011, it expanded its list of “high risk” businesses to include gun shops. Peter Weinstock, an attorney with Hunton & Williams, explained:

This administration has very clearly told the banking industry which customers they feel represent “reputational risk” to do business with….

Any companies that engage in any margin of risk as defined by this administration are being dropped.

In 2012, Bank of America terminated its 12-year relationship with McMillan Group International, a gun manufacturer in Phoenix, and American Spirit Arms in Scottsdale. Said Joe Sirochman, owner of American Spirit Arms:

At first, it was the bigger guys — gun parts manufacturers or high-profile retailers. Now the smaller mom-and-pop shops are being choked out….

They need their cash [and credit lines] to buy inventory. Freezing their assets will put them out of business.

That’s the whole point, according to Kelly McMillan:

This is an attempt by the federal government to keep people from buying guns and a way for them to combat the Second Amendment rights we have. It’s a covert way for them to control our right to manufacture guns and individuals to buy guns.

With the Obama administration unable to foist its gun control agenda onto American citizens frontally, this is a backdoor approach that threatens the very oxygen these businesses need to breathe. Richard Riese, a senior VP at the American Bankers Association, expanded on the attack through the banks’ back doors:

We’re being threatened with a regulatory regime that attempts to foist on us the obligation to monitor all types of transactions.

All of this is predicated on the notion that the banks are a choke point for all businesses.

How you vote matters.