A House committee is asking the IRS to turn over emails between the agency and the Federal Election Commission, after discovering a series of 2009 inter-agency exchanges in which embattled IRS official Lois Lerner might have inappropriately shared confidential tax information.
Tag Archives: IRS
House panel probing whether IRS-FEC 'inappropriately' sharing confidential tax information
A House committee is asking the IRS to turn over emails between the agency and the Federal Election Commission, after discovering a series of 2009 inter-agency exchanges in which embattled IRS official Lois Lerner might have inappropriately shared confidential tax information.
Obama’s “Phony” Scandals
By Rock Peters
“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing, and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball,” Barack Obama said in a speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. on July 24, 2013.
“If four Americans get killed, it’s not OPTIMAL.”–Obama’s calloused, abnormally detached, and incredibly narcissistic response to Comedy Central’s John Stewart’s question about the changing story of the Benghazi attack.
Does Obama think that the Muslim terrorist attack on our consulate in Libya on 9/11/2012 didn’t really happen and that four Americans (Ambassador Chris Stevens, Glenn Doherty, Sean Smith, and Ty Woods) weren’t actually murdered?
The Obama Laundry List of Phony Scandals
1. IRS targets Obama’s enemies: The IRS targeted conservative and pro-Israel groups prior to the 2012 election. Questions are being raised about why this occurred, who ordered it, whether there was any White House involvement, and whether there was an initial effort to hide who knew about the targeting and when.
2. Benghazi: This is actually three treasonous scandals into one:
a) The failure of the administration to protect the Benghazi mission.
b) The Obama administration changed the talking points in order to suggest the attack was motivated by an anti-Muslim video.
c) The intense stonewalling, complete shutdown, and absolute refusal of the White House to say what President Obama did the night of the attack.
d) Breaking 200 plus years of honorable American military tradition to never leave any solider behind.
3. Spying on the the AP: The Justice Department stole a plethora of Associated Press reporters’ phone records as part of a leak investigation.
4. James Rosengate: The Justice Department suggested that Fox News reporter James Rosen is a criminal for reporting about classified information and subsequently monitored his phones and emails.
5. The Holder perjury I: Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress that he had never been associated with “potential prosecution” of a journalist for perjury when, in fact, he personally signed the affidavit that alleged Fox News reporter James Rosen was a potential criminal.
6. The ATF “Fast and Furious” debacle: Allowed weapons from the U.S. to “walk” across the border into the hands of Mexican drug dealers. The ATF lost track of hundreds of firearms, many of which were used in crimes (including the December 2010 killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.)
7. Holder Perjury II: During congressional hearings held on May 3, 2011, Congressman Darrell Issa asked AG Eric Holder when he first knew about the “Fast and Furious” gun walking scheme. Eric Holder replied under oath: “I am not sure about the exact date but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.” Holder flat out lied to Congress under oath;”Project Gun Runner” (Fast and Furious) was launched by Obama with Holder’s full knowledge on March 24, 2009. Holder is guilty of perjury and should be arrested.
8. Secretary Kathleen Sebelius runs an extortion racket: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius solicited donations from companies HHS might regulate. The money would be used to help her sign up uninsured Americans for ObamaCare.
9. The Pigford scandal: A U.S. Agriculture Department effort that began as an …read more
Inside Boehner’s Strategy To Slow Walk Immigration To The Finish Line
House Republicans head home for the August break having done little to pass immigration reform, falling well short of Speaker John Boehner’s goal of voting on legislation before next week’s monthlong recess begins. But far from a failure of leadership, top House Republicans are casting the inaction as a tactical play designed to boost reform’s chances.
Keeping immigration on the back-burner helps avoid a recess filled with angry town-hall meetings reminiscent of the heated August 2009 protests where the backlash against health care reform coalesced. Doing nothing also starves Democrats of a target, Republicans argue.
“August was a central part of our discussions. People don’t want to go home and get screamed at,” a House GOP leadership aide said.
Instead, they’ll go home and talk about the need to stop government overreach, trying to draw voters’ attention back to the now largely dormant IRS controversy and the dismantling of Obamacare, a message that plays well with the Republican base.
But more than that, Republicans say, the delay in dealing with immigration helps them internally.
Read More at National Journal . By Chris Frates.
Photo Credit: Medill DC (Creative Commons)
House panel accuses IRS' Werfel of stonewalling probe
The House’s chief investigative committee on Tuesday accused the IRS of stonewalling its probe into the agency’s unfairly targeting Tea Party groups and other political organizations, saying Congress has received only a fraction of the documents it requested and many of those are useless.
IRS in the Crosshairs: a Discussion with the Acting Commissioner
While attending the IRS Nationwide Forum earlier today in Dallas, I had the opportunity to be part of a small group meeting with Principal Deputy Commissioner Daniel Werfel. His goal with our session was to have a substantive dialog regarding IRS strategic issues, something that is difficult to engage in currently in the beltway. The session included industry representatives from the practitioner community (Enrolled Agents, CPAs, Registered Tax Preparers, Certified Acceptance Agents, software providers, former IRS employees now working in the private sector). The variety of niches represented and the volleying for why customer service should not be cut to each niche was enlightening. As was Mr. Werfel’s awareness of the issues and limitations confronting each of the taxpayer constituencies represented. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Liechtenstein Bank Pays $23.8M To IRS For Helping Americans Evade Taxes
By Robert W. Wood, Contributor
The Department of Justice (DOJ), IRS and U.S. Attorney have announced another huge victory in their all-out war on tax evasion. Liechtensteinische Landesbank AG—LLB for short—will pay $23.8M to the feds but avoid prosecution. See LLB Non-Prosecution Agreement. According to the deal, LLB won’t face prosecution for a 10 year stretch of keeping secret accounts for U.S. taxpayers from 2001 through 2011. See DOJ Press Release. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
House panel accuses IRS's Werfel of stonewalling probe
The House’s chief investigative committee on Tuesday accused the IRS of stonewalling its probe into the agency’s unfairly targeting Tea Party groups and other political organizations, saying Congress has received only a fraction of the documents it requested and many of those are useless.
IRS Inspector Urges Crackdown On Mislabeling "Independent Contractors"
By Robert W. Wood, Contributor
The IRS isn’t the only government agency worried about workers mislabeled as “independent contractors.” When you pay independent contractors, there’s no income tax withholding and no employment taxes. Even assuming that the “contractor” files a tax return, the IRS won’t collect as much and will get it much later. Wage withholding is much, much better for the IRS. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Obama’s Secret Meeting To Screw Conservatives
Recently, IRS official William Wilkins has been implicated in the IRS scandal that targeted Obama’s political opponents. And Capitol Hill Daily has now learned he may have personally discussed his actions with President Obama – just days before Wilkins’ office released new procedures for how the IRS reviews conservative groups.
White House visitor logs confirm that a “William Wilkins” was at the White House on April 23, 2012, specifically to meet with Obama. Was it the same Wilkins? Unfortunately, everyone who can answer that question is hiding behind a lawyer.
Regardless, it’s now clear that directions were given to the IRS officials in Cincinnati from the highest levels of government to target perceived opponents of President Obama. This was no low-level operation. All of the testimony points up the chain of command.
This is a gross violation of the IRS rules intended to keep the agency above or outside of politics. The IRS should never be involved in promoting partisan politics.
If this was an isolated scandal, one might forgive the agency. But this is only one of multiple scandals that show the agency has become a nest of corruption.
A Laundry List of Scandals
Where to begin?
The IRS is giving incarcerated criminals who submit fraudulent returns tens of millions of dollars in refunds. These are dollars that felons aren’t eligible to receive. The fraud figure increases every year, and at last tally, the IRS dealt north of $35 million to crooks, according to a federal audit.
The IRS also gave one million noncitizens, most in the United States illegally, approximately $9 billion in tax credits – even though they didn’t provide valid Social Security numbers on their tax returns.
The IRS also handed out $33 million in bogus electric car credits.
Recently, two dozen IRS employees were charged with stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in government welfare, including food stamps and housing vouchers. The scheme fleeced U.S. taxpayers out of at least a quarter of a million dollars, according to federal prosecutors on the case.
Another scary prospect is the empowerment of the IRS as part of Obamacare. The IRS will be the go-to agency for enforcing the fines on Americans who don’t buy the expensive, mandated health insurance plans.
As the abuses multiply, it’s time to seriously consider the only real fix.
A Clear Solution
The fix that will end this pattern of scandals is total abolition of the IRS.
And I’m happy to report a movement is building on Capitol Hill to actually abolish the IRS. You see, only abolition can protect us from an agency which has become bathed in scandal.
Abolishing the agency would be easier than most understand. All Congress would have to do is simplify the tax system. With a changed system, we could end the aggressive, highly discretionary and unfair targeting by the IRS. Either a flat tax or a national consumption tax would allow the agency to be eliminated while improving compliance and increase revenues.
Several members of Congress have taken up the battle and called …read more
Second Circuit WorldCom Decision Evokes Nostalgia For Dialup
By Peter J Reilly, Contributor
It is somewhat odd to fit Internet technology into a statutory definition that has not been updated since the Mad Men era. The Second Circuit’s recent decision (IRS v WorldCom) is fraught with nostalgia. The decision is an appeal of a small part of a bankruptcy case that would be starting middle school if it were human. When something as big as WorldCom blows up, the fighting over the scraps can continue for quite a while since there are some pretty big scraps. The two scraps involved here are a claim by the IRS for $16,276,440.81 in excise tax. I don’t know how much that claim is worth to the government. Even at pennies on the dollar it would be few hundred grand. More significantly there was an order for the IRS to refund $38,297,513 in excise tax. The excise tax is the 3% excise on telephone services that was passed as an emergency war measure. I don’t remember that war, but my immigrant grandmother, Nana Reilly, did. It was against Spain (My cousin Marianne told me that Nana Reilly asked her once if she remembered the McKinley assassination. She had mixed him up with Kennedy.) …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Q&A: How Can An Accrual Basis Business Defer Revenue When It Receives Cash In Advance?
By Tony Nitti, Contributor Earlier today, the IRS published Revenue Procedure 2013-29, which expands the opportunity for accrual basis businesses that receive advance payments to defer the income related to those payments. This is one you should care about, particularly if you or your clients receive advance payments in exchange for redeemable gift cards. Let’s get to the Q&A. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Worried About Privacy? How About Common Core?
There’s an intense debate right now over “Common Core,” an effort to implement a set of education standards in public schools nationwide. The Common Core State Standards thus far have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.
Though it isn’t my area of expertise, I’ve received numerous impassioned emails on the subject. Among them, one person’s concerns particularly struck me.
This person is an expert in the field of education. She is thoughtful, serious, and no foe of public education. Her concerns especially hit home given current fears over privacy intrusions by the federal government. Those fears have swirled around the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, and the IRS. But they don’t end there. There are likewise potentially serious privacy problems involving current and proposed education policy, which likewise relate to data collection, dissemination, and use.
To that end, my friend is hoping to at least help kindle some public awareness.
“The portion [of current education policy] that I believe is most important for raising public awareness,” she writes, “is the changes to the FERPA regulations which have greatly expanded who has access to student data.” FERPA is the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974. Changes have been made to FERPA that (some believe) will leave parents uninformed as to how their children’s records are shared. “Parents seem totally unaware of what data is being collected,” she adds. “In Pennsylvania it is collected under something called the PIMS system, but in other states it has different labels.”
There’s more. There’s also the problem of a rise in “outside vendors and providers to manage student data—again, without parental consent.”
How, specifically, would this happen?
For starters, Common Core standards, as was the case with previous standards, lead to much testing, which involves a great deal of data collection on students. Coupled with this heightened collection of student data is the prevalence of so-called “longitudinal state reporting systems.” According to my friend, as part of the “Race to the Top” initiative (a federal educational initiative), states were encouraged to create “robust data collection systems.” These systems were touted as a mechanism to provide school districts, state governments, and federal policymakers with more data to analyze trends in student achievement and improve educational efforts. While this might seem benign, notes my friend, we cannot ignore the sheer volume of data that will be collected and how that data might be misused. For instance, most parents have no idea that their child’s “personal information” includes not just test scores but social security numbers, attendance records, records of interaction with school counselors, identification of learning disabilities, and even disciplinary records.
All of this is being collected.
And yet, because such enhanced data collection exceeds the resources of many districts and states, schools will be forced to contract the service to corporations that collect, manage, and store such data—and possibly share it. In other words, outside data managers must be employed to maintain this personal data on your kids. Is there any level of oversight to ensure that this …read more
IRS Travelgate: Brass Spent $100K Each On Travel
By Robert W. Wood, Contributor
For the IRS, the hits just keep on coming. The no longer obscure watchdog known as the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has a new bestseller: Analysis of Executive Travel Within the Internal Revenue Service. Ever since the Tea Party scandal, this inspector’s reports are pretty important. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Big Government and Central Banks: The Real Criminals
The British government has announced that it will be proposing legislation to have senior bankers face prison for “reckless” risk taking. This news item underscores two dangerous trends. The first is the largely unremarked upon phenomenon of modern democratic governments criminalizing more and more activities. In the U.S., for example, numerous prosecutions have been successfully pursued against corporate managers for the activities of subordinates that the managers didn’t order or even know about. Isn’t it a basic tenet of law that you can’t be charged with a crime you didn’t commit? A corollary to this is penalizing people for offenses they didn’t know they had committed. Yes, there has always been the axiom that ignorance of the law is no excuse. But that is for basic crimes like thievery, which you should know is illegal. In recent years, however, governments–especially regulators such as the EPA–have issued voluminous rules that can easily catch the unwary. The federal tax code is notorious for this. The frightening truth is that if the federal government wants to “get” you or your business, it can. There’s no way for law-abiding citizens not to get ensnared in the regulatory maw. Noted social observer and author Charles Murray is writing a book on what he rightfully describes as the increasing lawlessness of the U.S. government. The blizzard of new rules, many of them vaguely worded, undermines the basic foundation of the rule of law: simplicity and predictability. Murray finds the phenomenon far more widespread than most people realize. The recent Inspector General’s report on extensive, deliberate IRS abuses is but the tip of the iceberg. Another disturbing thing about the British news report is its reflection of the naive belief that more regulation means a safer, less risky financial system and economy. Big Government here and in Europe has perpetrated the astonishing myth that the recent financial crisis was caused by reckless and greedy private-sector bankers. No wonder the public howls for bankers’ heads. The real villains here were governments, particularly central banks. Experience has demonstrated time and again that when a country undermines the value of its currency, bad things happen. Both in the 1970s and in the early part of the last decade the Federal Reserve continually devalued the dollar, and other central banks followed suit with their monies to varying degrees. The result, predictably, was a commodities boom, a surge in prices for houses and farmland, a binge in government spending and a drought in productive investments. Just as a virus corrupts information in a computer, an unstable currency distorts markets. Take housing. People really believed that housing prices could only go up and up. No wonder lending standards went down. If a buyer defaulted, so what? The always appreciating asset would easily cover the mortgage. Under those circumstances purchasing a house with debt and little or no down payment looked like a sure, easy way to get rich. And weren’t brilliant financial engineers, like alchemists, designing securities that were turning packages of subprime …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Gambling Tips From The IRS? You Bet
By Robert W. Wood, Contributor
Do you enjoy rolling the dice, playing cards or betting on the ponies? However you gamble, one thing is clear: Gambling Winnings Are Always Taxable Income in the eyes of the IRS. You might think that’s all the IRS says about gambling. But actually, the IRS offers some tax tips for casual gamblers. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Did IRS appointee meet with Obama before new screening guidelines released?
A top IRS official and Obama appointee – who recently has emerged as a key figure in the IRS targeting scandal — may have met with President Obama just days before his office put out new guidance on how the agency screens conservative groups.
Video: Congressman On IRS Scandal: “How Dare Anybody Suggest That We’re At The End Of This”
By News Editor
Rep. Chaffetz: “This is the beginning”
TEFRA Partnership IRS Controversies: Now That The TEFRA Partnership Exam Is Complete With An FPPA, What Is A Partnership To Do?
When the IRS completes an examination of a TEFRA partnership, added layers of complexity must be taken in to account in determining the best response to the FPAA. In responding to a TEFRA partnership FPAA, traps for the unwary are embedded in invoking a judicial challenge. Specifically, the deposit requirement and the choice of venue decisions carry with them serious consequences that are addressed in this blog. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Opinions
Obama’s Government-Owned Propaganda Machine
The MSM is no longer the only propaganda machine for the Obama regime. With the demise of the restriction on propaganda, broadcasting to citizens from our own government has been repealed. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, buried deep within the last National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2013, now allows our dissembler-in-chief to broadcast propaganda directly to American citizens.
It went live on July 2nd. This will be a day that will demarcate the death of the Republic as Obama can now move forward with whatever agenda he wishes and will not have to worry about what the MSM says, does, or broadcasts; he has his own taxpayer-funded machine.
This can only inflame an already disquieted population and proves beyond a shadow of doubt the complicity of Congress with his agenda. It follows that this latest piece of legislation fits nicely with the IRS, NSA, and DOJ initiatives to stifle all opposition to the Obama agenda and can be used to shape public opinion that is turning decidedly oppressive, dictatorial, and capricious.
Curious that this law took effect shortly after all these scandals came to light, with even the MSM reporting on them? This is a wholesale abrogation of our founding principles as found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (and can only further the goals of tyranny.)
The full story on Tech Dirt website is found here and WND here.