A long time ago, I had a temporary job: opening mail for our dear but grossly underpaid public servants at the IRS. The best part of the job was reading the letters where taxpayers were ratted out by their friends and loved ones. I read letters where children turned in Mom and Dad, Moms turned in their kids, brother betrayed brother, the congregation narced on the pastor, and my favorite - someone turned in Grandma in the nursing home “…she must have hidden money if she can afford that kind of care…” It was absolutely great. At the time, the senior mail opening guy said there was a reward based on the taxes they owed, and that the snitch was always kept anonymous. My question: does the IRS still offer rewards? Would I be kept anonymous? Where can I turn someone in? How much information do I have to provide? I would dearly love to sic the IRS on my stupid ugly obnoxious low life pain the ass disgrace to the human race piece of crap neighbor, who is one of those people who never holds a job, never has his name on a bill or deed, collects disability, but has managed to buy a house, two new cars, all new furniture, and had major home improvements (or in his case, major uglifications) done. Have any of you guys done this?
When I was younger I considered writing the IRS about the boyfriend of a girl I liked, who was a drug dealer and had bought a house for his mother and a couple of cars yet hadn’t had a ‘real’ job for years. I decided it was too much trouble and instead just destroyed his Mustang.
I was a meanspirited bastard back then. 8^)
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- I recall this also but as I remember, there was a minimum dollar amount they had to recover, like $800,000 or something -big-. You got a percentage of whatever they recovered. The IRS had wanted this law for quite some time because they thought that it would lead to massive recovery of unreported income but most was stuff like your example, just nickel-and-dime cases without real evidence. - Don’t know much more than that though. - MC
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Man! Snitching to the IRS would’ve screwed him better than just destroying his car. With enough evidence, he could’ve been in the stir for 10 years.
Remember, tax evasion is how they nabbed Capone!
A real quick search at http://www.irs.gov revealed this document:
http://www.irs.gov/prod/bus_info/tax_pro/irm-part/part04/27544.html
It contains this helpful advice to the IRS employee:
*An internal revenue employee receiving information from an informant should neither suggest nor encourage the informant to submit a claim for reward. *
Can you guess what word the very next sentence begins with? That’s right: “However,…”
The way I had it explained to me by a tax attorney (which I am not), it goes something like this. If the IRS acts upon your information, and recovers revenue which it otherwise would not have recovered, you are entitled to ask for a reward, if you happen to know that you can. But there’s the rub. If the guy is already red-flagged for not filing and the IRS simply hasn’t gone after him yet, no soup for you. But as a consolation prize, you’ve just done the equivalent of submitting a FOIA request on yourself to the FBI. Someone, somewhere, is going to wonder why you’ve gone to this trouble, and may take the time to take a closer look at you. Do you really want that?
I think that the reward is a pretty hefty percentage of the revenue recovered–maybe half?
But of course, that reward money is taxable income.
I believe Heidi Fleisch, who ran the prostitution ring in LA, was also nabbed by the IRS for not reporting income when they could not get any other charges to stick.
From what was revealed in some congressional hearings just a few years ago, the IRS is totally out of control and acting more like thugs than the mob so I would just leave them both alone and let them fight it out themselves. I am not about to take sides.
Just complete a tax form for your neighbor, jwg. Aint no law saying you can’t do someone else’s taxes…
What if it turns out that your neighbor got all that money to buy neat and suspiciously expensive stuff by turning someone else in to the IRS?
That would be quite creepy.
This may be a pretty good spot to toss in a rumor I recently heard here inside the beltway. Apparently in an effort to “reform” the Criminal Investigation Division, IRS higher-ups recently took a huge percentage of the CID people and forced them into the IRS equivalent of customer service!
Anyone out there see this happen? Those folks cannot be happy campers, neither the transferees nor the overworked folks left behind.