Here’s another one. You can look at my previous cite for a list of incidents in the past 10 years. You will not find credible evidence that the IRS is a clean organization. Look at the TIGTAsite. Why do you think congress had to establish this agency?
TIGTA is just the old IRS Inspection service, aka Internal affairs. Every cop shop has one. The FBI, Secret Service, your local PD, etc.
Congress renamed it and made a big deal out of it to make people believe Congress is 'doing something". I’d trust a IRS agent long before I’d trust a Congressman.
Here’s just an introductionto someone who blew the whistle on their illegal activities. The 1997 congressional investigation uncovered numerous abuses and criminal activities within the IRS. I’m biased because I was the target of their corruption, but the current list of complaints against the IRS does not convince me these kind of activities have stopped.
Show me any cite that the IRS is considered a clean agency. That IRS agents are considered “Untouchable”.
In 1991, the IRS had closer to twice that many employees. Cite That makes a few bad apples even less significant.
And I would agree that the IRS is about the cleanest any government agency is going to get. Now if they could only get their employees to read the publications… 
November 23, 2004
IRS employee was arrested for possession of child pornography on IRS computers.
The timing sounds right, if so, this guy was in my moms unit in the Fresno Service center. He was also cited for a slough of other little things in that he paid for his postage mail ordering the porn via IRS postal meters and copied order forms on copiers that tag every photocopy for tracking purposes.
Just a sidenote to Tripolar.
In the grand scheme of things, they are pretty damn clean. Take a long hard look at anyplace with this size of workforce and you get tons of games being played. Passive security like copiers and printers that watermark everything are everywhere. Restrictions on electronics in some areas and the simple fact that anything you do wrong is going to be a federal crime that will land you in prison several states away.
My sister also works for the IRS in IT, systems are constantly audited and things like people firing up their own little wireless networks to share unfiltered internet are found and shut down quickly. It often takes some serious creativity to defeat the system.
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Okay, any business, big or small, public or private, and make blunders or have some bad apples.
The real evilness of bureaucracies, which seems proportional to the size of the bureaucracy, is their unwillingness or inability to correct the blunders that do happen. Look, I had a little dispute with the phone company last year – these things happen – but it took me two dozen phone calls to get it cleared up. Now look at all the horror stories about health insurance companies and big banks and foreclosures. Setting aside the allegations of deliberate evil they do, even the evils that seem to be just mistakes tend to be monstrously difficult to get fixed.
Now scale that up to the size of the IRS, which tends to work on the basis that the taxpayer is guilty until he proves himself innocent mostly. They have their rules rigged that way. TriPolar’s biggest complaint here is not that one crooked agent stole his money – the big phuck-up here is that he got stuck with the loss, and had to fight it at his own expense, and even all the cancelled checks and bank statements in the world don’t seem to count for shit when it’s the IRS at the other end of the line.
That lady in the L. A. Times article was prosecuted for stealing from the U. S. Government, but it looks like it was the taxpayers whose checks were stolen who lost. The article says the culprit may have to make restitution to those taxpayers. Did that ever happen? The IRS ought to make restutition to the taxpayers and the thief should make restitution (if she can) to the IRS.
It’s things like that, that make the IRS look like such a big crooked organization.
Snort
When Congress is used as a yardstick for trustworthiness, you know things are not looking good.
Directly suing one is pretty much impossible, but they get fired for doing stupid shit all the time. Just in one service center its not unusual to see dozens of people a year getting fired doing things like simply accessing/viewing records that they are not assigned (taking a peek at their favorite movie stars tax return and such). They go to great lengths to “police their own” as well as having FBI and or Secret service folks assigned to the service center as part of their own internal investigations groups who do not answer to the IRS chain of command.
Amusingly enough one of the best ways to light a fire under the IRS is to contact your congressman. If you can get your congressman to take interest the IRS has 72 hours to respond to his/her questions.
First off, I’ve admitted my bias here, and made clear the reason. My original message was simply that all tax disasters are not created by delinquent taxpayers.
That pretty much covers it.
I’m not condemning everyone who works at the IRS (even though I want to). But the IT group is not the problem. It’s easy to keep an eye on them. The problem are the agents out in the field who collect the money directly. Don’t ever write IRS on a check, agents have started businesses named things like FIRST WIDGET COMPANY, and the payee gets magically transformed. If you give them cash, you can kiss it all goodbye if the agent is dishonest.
My case was horrendous because it involved FICA taxes. It takes an act of congress to discharge those. Otherwise, the money must come from somewhere, and if it isn’t collected from taxpayers, it will come from IRS employees, along with some rolling heads. And those heads are unlikely to be at the top. This makes otherwise honest employees cooperate in the coverup and the theft.
BTW: I was saved from an even worse situation by an IRS agent. A top level guy came up from Manhattan to help finalize the deal so I could put an end to it. I suppose he was safe in his position, and maybe near retirement, and not worried about repercussions. Had this been an ordinary business situation I would have sent a letter to his boss commending him. In this case I was afraid he might suffer if I did so.
Who the fuck pays taxes in cash? I don’t even know how one would go about that … stuffing a wad of twenties into an envelope? Really? Not to mention … WHY would you do that?
Poor people have tax problems too. It’s often what makes them poor. And they are common targets since they can’t afford to fight back. Imagine an IRS agent showing up on your doorstep every Friday evening to try and take the meager pay you collected for the week. They tried this nonsense on me, but I laughed at them. I had a subchapter S set up by that point, only paid myself through it. Your average minimum wager won’t have the means to go that route.
Sooner or later they’re going to compare their records, notice that you never filed, but had earned income.
This could go two ways: They’ll make assumptions about other income and say you were shortchanging them and make you cough up the money, or they’ll do the number crunching, decide you may have actually been due some money back, but too bad so sad, you won’t get it without asking for it.
You have, IIRC, something like 3 years to file or you can’t get your money back.
Only time I saw something where the business got doorstopped like that was I worked for a pizza franchise and the franchise owner had not been depositing payroll taxes, witholding, sales taxes, nothing, then skipped town, it took them three months to get to that point and that was for several hundred thousand dollars. (13 pizza places worth)
However, you can get a money order very cheaply. I know that the Post Office has offered them for as little as $0.50, though I don’t keep up on the current rates.
And any IRS agent showing up at your doorstep means things have gone way off the tracks already. Time to get someone qualified to practice before the IRS (such as a CPA) and have that person start dealing with the agent. Or at least contact the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service, which is a free service available to any taxpayer with a problem.
Get a money order. One of the utter shit jobs at the IRS is working in the mail room. Entry level GS1 nobodys, under a casino worth of cameras. They hate it as they run into tons of cash and it is a huge pain and any discrepancy can cause you problems. Not to mention dealing with the people that send fake bombs, $2348.94 in pennies, and envelopes full of baking soda. IF you want someone who hates their barely over minimum wage job and occasionally has the chance to scoop up some cash that is a huge problem area.
I know how to deal with issue, but you have to consider the poor guy who doesn’t. And if he’s literally poor, hiring a CPA or lawyer isn’t possible. Things don’t have to go way off track either. They can do this to anyone who owes anything, and if the agent is dishonest, it’s a good way to feather his pockets. Or in my case, the attempt was probably to save his job. And the Taxpayer Advocate Service, well I don’t know, but I haven’t heard good things, but that’s just hearsay.
Not to derail the thread, but recently I saw a commercial by one of these lawyers which bragged of their success in fixing a client’s $1.4 million tax debt. $1.4 mill? Seriously? How does anyone even get that kind of money without thinking, “Geez, maybe I better hire an accountant”?
In my first year of having a brokerage account I did my reporting wrong for that and the IRS thought I made $100000 more in capital gains than I actually did. I’d reported all profits that I made, but the brokerage reported to the IRS only what I’d sold the securities for, and the IRS assumed it was all profit because I didn’t report the cost basis of those trades. Once I updated my return with that info, it all went away. It was my bad for not reporting something that I was supposed to, but it was an honest mistake and the IRS treated it as such.
I could see going to a lawyer instead and having them do the same thing, and then being able to advertise, “solved leahcim’s $30000 (or whatever it was) tax nightmare!!!”