Some bits and pieces from here and there:
- The IRS is envisioning hiring freezes and furloughs this year, but also seems to be showing a strange lack of care when it does hire people — particularly as tax-season temporary help. According to a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration audit, the agency rehired hundreds of former employees who had significant “substantiated conduct or performance issues” during a previous stint with the agency, including “unauthorized access to taxpayer information, leave abuse, falsification of official forms, unacceptable performance, misuse of IRS property, and off-duty misconduct” — indeed five such new hires “had willfully failed to file their Federal tax returns.”
- Speaking of IRS woes. Here’s a link to a promotional video about the IRS’s new data processing computers… back when they were new. According to agency commissioner John Koskinen, they haven’t changed much since then. “We’re running applications that were running when John F. Kennedy was president. That’s how antiquated the system is.”
- The Nuclear Resister profiles war tax resister and activist Bonnie Urfer. “Bonnie’s conscientiously self-limited income keeps her from supporting the war system which now gets about half of everyone’s federal income taxes. Living under the taxable limit has always been part of her life of resisting militarism in thought, word and deed.”
