How you can resist funding the government →
about the IRS and U.S. tax law/policy →
IRS incompetence →
at least their website is good
I don’t have many nice things to say about the IRS, but I’ve always respected their thoroughness in making information easily available on the web.
If I want a form, or a statistic, or an obscure ruling, or tax-law-made-simple info for the non-accountant, I can usually find just what I’m after at irs.gov.
(And I’m a linux geek, too, so I respect that they have all of this available in multiple formats, none of which require Windows or other MicroSoft software.)
The IRS also announced this week that they’re going to be making available on their site PDF forms that you can fill in using the free Adobe Reader.
That ought to make ’s taxes a little tidier at least.
I visited the IRS download site a few days back and was able to download the IRS versions of my tax returns for , my “records of account” from which included the tax return information and information about actions the agency had taken to try to collect from me, my “account transcripts” from which shows just the latter (the agency’s collection actions and other such status changes), and, most interestingly to me, something called the “wage and income transcripts” from .
These gave a rundown of all of the assets or income that I have that have been reported to the IRS — including my health savings account, individual retirement accounts, interest, book royalties, and payment from clients for my contracting work.
This sort of information could be useful for tax resisters who are trying to foil IRS seizure efforts.
Myanmar’s shadow Opposition government, the National Unity Government, has urged the public to stop paying for electricity.
In , it said that 97 percent of people in Mandalay and 98 percent in Yangon had done so, costing the regime $1 billion by that point.
For a while now, U.S. taxpayers have been able to access some of their tax records held by the IRS via the agency’s on-line portal.
This required a somewhat onerous process of signing up for an account — a process that’s a bit more invasive and difficult than signing up for a similar account at your bank.
I’ve tried to talk a few war tax resisters through the process because it can be useful to have better visibility into what information the IRS is assembling about you.
But often, they throw up their hands at some point and say it’s not worth it, because it really does seem like more trouble than it ought to be.
The agency says that by , the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device.
[C]ompleting the process requires submitting at least two secondary identification documents, such as as a Social Security card, a birth certificate, health insurance card, W-2 form, electric bill, or financial institution statement.
After re-uploading all of this information, ID.me’s system prompted me to “Please stay on this screen to join video call.”
However, the estimated wait time when that message first popped up said “3 hours and 27 minutes.”
The income of “closely-held businesses” (Schedule C / pass-through / non-corporately structured) in the United States is taxed at special rates and with special rules, but on the owners’ individual tax returns.
A new report from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center says that these special rules, combined with some clever gaming of the rules and some outright noncompliance, mean that about half of that income goes completely untaxed.
One theory is that youngsters can fall into denial-of-service attacks by firstly playing online games, and then falling into installing mods, hacks, and even remote access trojans to get the upperhand on their gaming rivals.
Just when I think I’ve heard it all about the troubles at the IRS, everything turns out to be worse than I heard:
Remember when I told you about how the IRS was rolling out a new way for people to sign on to their on-line systems, and that it was a bit invasive, difficult, and buggy?
And then remember when I told you how the rollout was going poorly and generating a lot of push-back?
Well, the awful just continues to pile up and now the IRS is scrapping the new sign-on process and going back to the drawing board.
Meanwhile, some seven million people may have tried to use the new process to log in, a process that included sending in “selfies” for biometric testing, which attracted the ire of privacy advocates.
The contractor who designed and operated the identification verification service says these people can request to have these selfies deleted.
Reading between the lines, I think this contractor is going to try to force everybody to use the back-up plan that was already in place for if the automatic selfie-check didn’t work: to have a video chat with an employee who would “eyeball” the chatter to see if their identity matches up with what’s on their paperwork.
This isn’t really any less invasive than the selfie method, but maybe it triggers people’s “big brother” alarms less.
It’ll certainly be less automated and therefore more expensive and time-consuming.
But the IRS is no stranger to doing things the more expensive and time-consuming way.
For example, their mail-sorting and -opening machines have been broken for a long time, and IRS employees now have to do the work by hand.
This means that if you send them a check, it takes them longer than it should for them to get that check out of the envelope and into the U.S. Treasury.
This delay also means the government loses out on interest they could be earning on that money.
How much interest? About $165 million a year.
It would only cost $650,000 to buy completely new machines, or $365,000 to repair the broken ones.
And remember how I told you how the IRS had stopped sending out some enforcement notices to taxpayers?
Taxpayers were getting frightening notices suggesting that the IRS didn’t think they’d filed their taxes, when in fact their tax returns were sitting in an enormous pile of tax returns the agency hadn’t gotten around to processing yet.
So the IRS said it would stop sending out a few types of notice until it got all that sorted out — but said that it couldn’t stop sending out a bunch of others because it might mean they’d lose their chance to go after genuine tax scofflaws.
Well, now they’ve thrown in the towel and said they’ll stop sending out a dozen more types of notices including the balance due, balance due second notice, notice of intent to levy, and withholding compliance letters that are standard issue to tax resisters like myself.
And remember how I told you that the IRS had a backlog of some 14 million unprocessed tax returns and other taxpayer correspondence?
Turns out it’s more like 24 million.
Meanwhile: “The agency sought to fill 5,000 positions for several campuses across the country in time for this tax season but was able to hire fewer than 200.”
In other news, the IRS is eager to reduce the size of the underground economy by demanding more reports on gig workers and others who get irregular payments through platforms like Paypal, Venmo, Etsy, and Zelle.
But this isn’t going smoothly either.
It seems to be raising more resentment than tax money, at least so far. And it’s easy to bypass.
If you pay someone using one of these platforms and explicitly say you’re paying for goods or services, maybe it’ll eventually get reported as income.
But if you don’t say this, as far as the platform is concerned maybe you’re just sending a gift or reimbursing someone for part of a meal you shared where they picked up the tab.
Is today’s IRS going to send auditors out to make sure nothing falls through the cracks this way?
Yeah sure.
In other news:
The tax strike against the Edmonton Incinerator continues to attract more strikers as the early adopters prepare for their first day in court.
Turkish opposition politician Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu announced that he plans to refuse to pay his utility bills until president Erdoğan withdraws 50% price hikes instituted at the beginning of the year. Some Alevist cemevis have also stopped paying.
The ragtag human guerrilla war against the traffic ticket robots continues, with robots succumbing to human attacks or being frustrated by human ingenuity in the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Italy, and France in recent weeks.
