How you can resist funding the government →
about the IRS and U.S. tax law/policy →
IRS incompetence →
January 2019 government “shutdown”
Furloughed IRS workers protest the federal government “shutdown” that delayed their paychecks.
The U.S. federal government “shutdown” forced the IRS to furlough 88% of its employees.
The agency then recalled about half of them, calling them “essential employees”, so they could back up Trump’s last-minute promise that the IRS would still send out tax refunds even without an operating budget.
The government has only reopened temporarily.
The political conflict underlying the kerfluffle was never resolved, and Congress will either have to pass a budget or another short-term spending patch (and President Bluster will have to sign it) by the middle of next month or the whole “shutdown” impasse begins again.
There’s a new National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee newsletter out, with content including:
TaxProf Blog gives a fascinating overview of the bureaucratic morass the IRS slogs through even on a good day, when it’s not shut down.
There are multiple oversight bodies and committees all demanding that the agency do this or that, and obsolete laws demanding that it collect irrelevant data.
It’s a wonder they can get anything done.
Before the U.S. federal government “shutdown,” back in , I ordered a batch of this year’s tax forms from the IRS.
I like to file on paper, rather than electronically, in part because if we all did that we’d bring the IRS to its knees.
But anyway… during the “shutdown” the IRS sent me a letter saying it had gotten my order but would not be able to fulfill it right away.
Here we are in mid-February, three weeks after the “shutdown” ended, and I’m still waiting.
That’s just a superficial indication of the chaos that’s roiling the already-overtaxed (ha!) agency.
Years of increasing responsibilities, budget cuts, blows to employee morale, and ever-more-dilapidated IT infrastructure (“profoundly archaic”, one recent report put it, and risking a “catastrophic systems collapse”) have taken their toll.
Hiring freezes have led to a graying workforce that is retiring in droves.
The “shutdown” was further insult to the injuries.
And that, in a year when the agency has had to change its rules and processes to deal with a new tax law and the most radically restructured tax forms in recent memory.
That all requires employee retraining which was supposed to have been happening in the weeks leading up to tax filing season, that is, the time when the agency had to shut its doors and send its seasonal employees home.
The new federal income tax law that goes into effect this filing season was the usual slapdash exercise in political posturing and lobbyist pissing matches.
Naturally a plethora of loopholes and shelters bubbled to the surface after the ooze settled.
A set of tax law experts has made “an effort to supply the analysis and deliberation that should have accompanied the bill’s consideration and passage,“ and they conclude that “[m]any of the new changes fundamentally undermine the integrity of the tax code and allow well-advised taxpayers to game the new rules through strategic planning.”
Details here: The Games They Will Play: Tax Games, Roadblocks, and Glitches Under the 2017 Tax Legislation
After all of the talk of tax cuts, Americans may be surprised at getting fewer, smaller, and later-to-arrive income tax refunds than they’re used to this year.
While that’s not a very meaningful metric in the big scheme of things, it is something that can contribute to the degradation of taxpayer morale, as many taxpayers — subconsciously or merely short-sightedly — see their tax refund as a measure of how generous or costly the government is to them.
The usual stories about massively profitable companies like Netflix or Amazon not paying taxes (or indeed getting tax refunds) are also doing the rounds and eroding taxpayer morale this year.
Susanne Großmann of Pax Christi and Netzwerk Friedenssteuer attempted last week to appeal for a refund of 5% of her taxes, on conscientious objection to military taxation grounds.
Some 17,000 taxpayers in Catalonia also are paying their federal taxes to the Catalan tax agency rather than the Spanish one, in acts of civil disobedience.
There’s a tax strike underway in Beni, North Kivu to protest the failure of the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to provide security in the region.
More roadside traffic ticket generating speed cameras have been attacked in recent weeks, in South Arica and France.
Spain has moved on to using drones instead.
There’s not a lot of meat on the bones here, but Andrew Leahey connects the dots and shows how Trump’s contempt for paying his own taxes and his undermining of the prestige of government are likely to undermine “tax morale” in the United States with long-term consequences for how willing traditionally sheepish American taxpayers are to cough up their tribute.
Of the furloughed workers surveyed, more than 35% missed a rent or mortgage payment, 30% went to a food pantry, 72% experienced mental health issues, 42% wanted to make a career change and 65% were very or somewhat concerned about their finances post-shutdown.
In the open-ended response portion of the survey, an employee wrote, “We are U.S.A. citizens that have families to support.
Often we hear we deserve it, because we work for IRS.
We are doing a job that is dictated by Congress.
It is surprising how people seem to want others to hurt.
It is sort of sickening.”
Another employee described going back to work during tax season:
“With a month of catch up at my busiest season, it is so stressful.
This is the first time in 15 years I am exhausted after work and do not want to go in the mornings.
That was never the case before.”
