President Barack Obama proposed increasing the budget for the Internal Revenue Service by 9.4 percent to hire more than 5,000 new employees, most of whom would pursue tax cheats. The president’s fiscal 2012 budget released today sets funding for the tax-collection agency at $13.3 billion, an increase of $1.1 billion from 2010, the last time a full appropriation was made for the IRS. Almost half of the increase, or $460 million, would support the agency’s tax-enforcement programs. Under the plan, the IRS would focus on fighting tax evasion through the use of offshore accounts and cheating by corporate and high-wealth taxpayers. It also would seek out fraudulent tax preparers. [Bloomberg]
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One IRS Agent Needs to Work on His Bribery Technique
- Caleb Newquist
- June 4, 2010
An Internal Revenue Service agent is charged with accepting a bribe from two business owners in exchange for lowering their taxes.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office says 40-year-old Roger Anthony Coombs met with the two owners on May 8 to discuss an IRS audit of their businesses. Prosecutors say Coombs offered to reduce the $60,000 the business owners owed in taxes to $11,000 if they would pay him $9,700.
Coombs was arrested Wednesday after the business owners reported the offer to law enforcement officers.
How does a $49k reduction in taxes equate to a $9,700 pay off? Were these business owners more interested in greasing him $9,700 for a $0 tax liability? Because if that was the case, this happened in Minnesota, not the South, where that sort of thing could go unnoticed.
Or maybe they got pissed after he turned down their offer to seal the deal with a Starbucks?
The TIGTA’s Nagging of the IRS Delves into Phone Etiquette
- Caleb Newquist
- May 12, 2010
In case you’re not up to speed on the federal bureaucracy org chart, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s expressed purpose is to tell the IRS what it is they suck at doing and what they can do to quit sucking at it.
The latest bad report card for the IRS is that of protecting the identity of taxpayers who call the Service for help. The epic fail is due to customer reps not being inquisitive enough when identifying callers and not their inability to use their inside voices. The TIGTA presents its displeasure with the phone “assistors” in its latest report:
From our statistical sample of 180 contact recordings, we determined that assistors did not properly follow procedures when authenticating 29 (16 percent) callers, increasing the risk of unauthorized disclosures. Based on these results, the projected number of callers with increased risk of unauthorized disclosures is 44,067 for 1 week.
So, you figure 2.2 million unauthorized disclosures a year. Maybe that’s a legitimate concern but in the grand scheme of things, is it really that bad? If you consider the fact that 22.4 million people aren’t even getting help, that seems like a pretty good number. Regardless of our realistic standards, the TIGTA has more harping to do:
During our review of 48 (27 percent) of the 180 sampled calls, we were able to overhear other assistors discussing other callers’ Personally Identifiable Information. For 10 calls (6 percent), we were able to clearly hear parts of conversations with other callers. For 38 calls (21 percent), other assistors’ interactions with callers were overheard, but we could not clearly understand the conversations. This happened because assistors did not put callers on hold when they were researching the taxpayers’ accounts. Also, the physical layout of employee workstations at call centers allows other conversations to be easily overheard.
So in this particular case it sounds like the IRS has two choices 1) force everybody to become low talkers or 2) spring for a larger cube farm so people aren’t up in each other’s shit.
The real question her is, can we realistically expect an error rate of zero from the IRS? When did “good enough for government work” no longer apply?
Telephone Authentication Practices Need Improvements to Better Prevent Unauthorized Disclosures [TIGTA via TaxProf]
Sarah Palin Didn’t Need Another Reason to Dislike the IRS
- Caleb Newquist
- April 27, 2010
“Who would have thought that the IRS would have a favorability rating a third higher than the tea party movement’s? Or that the IRS would be twice as popular as Palin?”
~ David Cay Johnston, on a recent poll that showed the IRS having a 49% favorable rating versus the former governor’s rating of less than 25% (Nancy Pelosi was 29%).