"The Real Internal Revenue Scandal"

[applegrove]

The Real Internal Revenue Scandal

The Editorial Board at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/opinion/sunday/the-real-internal-revenue-scandal.html?_r=1

"SNIP............................



There is a scandal going on at the Internal Revenue Service, but it has nothing to do with Lois Lerner or her missing emails. House Republicans have not given up on their noisy crusade to tie Ms. Lerner to what they imagine to be widespread political corruption within the Obama administration, but all they have proved is that the I.R.S. is no better at backing up its computer files than most other government agencies.

No, the real scandal is what Republicans did to cripple the agency when virtually no one was looking. Since the broad Tea Party-driven spending cuts of 2010, the agency’s budget has been cut by 14 percent after inflation is considered, leading to sharply reduced staff, less enforcement of the tax laws and poor taxpayer service.

As the economist Jared Bernstein noted recently in The Washington Post, a weakened I.R.S. enforcement staff will be unable to make a dent in the $385 billion annual gap between what taxpayers owe and what they pay — an unintended tax cut, mostly for the rich, that represents 11 percent of this year’s spending. Middle-class taxpayers who struggle to fill out their 1040s may welcome a diminished threat of an audit, but in fact this reduction is not about them. The I.R.S. audits a far higher percentage of tax returns from people reporting incomes over $200,000 than from those reporting less, because that is where the money is (along with the most profitable cheating).

But in 2013, it audited only 24 percent of returns over $10 million, compared with 30 percent in 2010. Of returns reporting between $1 million and $5 million, it audited 16 percent in 2013, compared with 21 percent in 2010. That is great news for the nation’s highest-income taxpayers, many of whom donate generously to Republican politicians to keep their taxes low. They are getting their money’s worth from lawmakers who debilitate revenue collection while claiming to be deeply worried about the budget deficit.




..........................SNIP"

[Skink]

1. Payback?

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

2. More blatant hypocrisy from the Rs. The list goes on and on and on.

[TygrBright]

3. More than a million tax-exempt organizations already...

...and thousands of new nonprofit status applications every year.

The staff of the Tax Exempt Organizations division is one of the smallest, with the highest "caseloads" in the whole agency. They're so overburdened that in attempting to enforce the new Sarbanes-Oxley requirements passed in 2009, they ERRONEOUSLY "automatically revoked" the tax-exempt status of more than 60,000 nonprofits.

It now takes more than nine MONTHS for a new application for nonprofit status to even be assigned to a Determinations case worker when needed.

The problem is twofold: Legitimate nonprofits doing legitimate, needed charity work are being yanked around and inhibited and outright discouraged from doing their work. At the same time, scam artists and pseudo-"charities" abusing nonprofit status for their own benefit are proliferating at an unprecedented rate.

I very much fear that the real goal here is to eliminate nonprofit status altogether. Except, perhaps, for foundations that provide some tax exemptions for our Beloved Oligarchs.

worriedly,
Bright

[rickyhall]

4. It's the cutbacks that led to the shortcuts that caused the whole dustup!

In the first place. Same with Benghazi. Cutbacks caused the underprotected diplomatic mission. It's always repugs make the problems so they can blame them on the president and the liberals. Just like W puts us in the red so they can cutback social programs. It's always the same old con. When will the other half of the country figure that out? Ever?

[Cha]

5. K^R

[Iliyah]

6. K & R

yep, look over there - - - Benghazi!
Look over there - - - IRS against Tea Party (worse for Liberal Groups tho)
Look over there - - - F & F, ummmm, NRA sending guns re profits over the border

et al.,