Why the IRS just LOVES to attack the poor

Why the IRS just LOVES to attack the poor

https://ift.tt/1RfwK1f The entire idea behind progressive income tax rates - like the ones US tax code demands - is that the rich pay nearly all the taxes, and the poor pay virtually nothing. The tax rates for the rich are higher, exemptions are blown out, and deductions are phased out. Meanwhile for the poor - their tax rates are the lowest - assuming they exceeded the exemption amount in the first place. So you would think, the poor - as a whole — would have very little reason to ever have a problem with the IRS. So now to the story - ProPublica - a website I believe to be left-leaning, still, regardless of your political beliefs - did some great reporting into an issue tax attorneys like myself are too familiar with. The IRS attacks the poor who are weak. In fact, the IRS loves to attack the weak. The IRS loves to attack the weak because they can’t fight back. From a recent article written by Paul Kiel: Auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits — of which there were about 380,000 last year, accounting for 39% of the total the IRS conducted — are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time, either. Isn’t this crazy? Nearly half of an audits the IRS conducts are waged against poor people! How outrageous is this? Oh oh it is worse than you thought. Here’s a quote from the National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olsen. “A survey by the Taxpayer Advocate Service found that more than a quarter of Earned Income Tax Credit recipients who were audited didn’t even understand that they were under audit." So why is the IRS doing this? I’ll give the most charitable response I can. The IRS doesn’t have the auditors it used to. The IRS claims to be about 75% of their highest strength, but I can tell you , they are operating at 50% of effective strength. Audits can take years to complete and demoralized examiners often retire as soon as they can, sometimes in the middle of an audit. Now why does the IRS not have the budget? Well according to Republicans political shenanigans occurred that have yet to be accounted for. So their response is to cut the IRS’s budget and keep it that way. Yet, for some reason - the IRS still wants to have great statistics to brag about to Congress and to impress the America people with. See - the IRS bemoans that auditing the so-called rich - another clumsy label - is hard. Yeah I suppose it is. There are tax firms like ours whose job it is to make the IRS’s job as hard as possible. Because yes we do enjoy giving the IRS a challenge. But lost in why it is so hard to audit the rich is the problem of the overcomplicated tax code. It is not nearly as hard to audit the so-called rich in other countries because their tax systems tend to be adminstratible - they simply don’t have the vague, massive ever expanding tax code. The US tax code is so complicated no one person understands it all - not even close. So firms like mine take advantage of the IRS’s own ignorance of its own seemingly endless code and regulations the best that we can. Using the vastness of the tax code against the IRS can be quite an effective strategy. Parent & Parent LLP 144 South Main Street Wallingford, CT 06492 (203) 269-6699 info@irsmedic.com https://youtu.be/V2-VHZyLgko IRS Medic