The Biden-Harris administration tried improve tax compliance on tips prior to Vice President Kamala Harris’ following Trump with a vow to end tax on tips.
In 2023, the Treasury Department introduced the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program to “take advantage of advancements in point-of-sale, time and attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance.”
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The United States Postal Service (USPS) gave law enforcement thousands of names, addresses and other details from the letters and packages of Americans without court approval, The Washington Post reported Monday.
The USPS said it generally only granted information requests from law enforcement agencies when it aided in tracking down a crime suspect; however, records obtained by the Post showed that 97 percent of the 60,000 requests from law enforcement were approved over an eight-year period. Between 2015 and 2023, over 312,000 letters and packages were recorded without receiving judicial approval.
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A group of 21 state financial officers on Monday urged the Department of the Treasury to terminate the IRS’s Direct File pilot program, contending that its shortcomings were likely to lead to problems for filers, cause needless confusion, and result in lost state revenues.
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The House Judiciary Committee has opened an inquiry to whether the IRS is using artificial intelligence to invade Americans’ financial privacy after an agency employee was captured in an undercover tape suggesting there was a widespread surveillance operation underway that might not be constitutional.
Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., sent a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding documents, and answers as to how the agency is currently employing artificial intelligence to comb through bank records to look for possible tax cheats.
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For decades, cold, hard data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have shown that states like New Jersey, Illinois and California are paying a high price for allowing dues-hungry union bosses to continue getting workers fired for refusal to bankroll their organizations.
Year after year, far more taxpayers have been leaving forced-unionism states than moving into them. And the average tax filer moving out of a forced-unionism state has reported having an adjusted gross income (AGI) on his or her IRS form that is substantially higher than the average for a tax filer moving into a forced-unionism state.
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The Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday announced roughly $1 billion in penalty relief to those owing back taxes from 2020 and 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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New Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guidelines for the federal electric vehicle (EV) tax credit are a “recipe for fraud,” warns the head of the Tax Foundation.
Consumers will now be able to automatically claim the tax credit at the point of sale on new or used EV purchases, rather than wait to claim it on their tax return, according to the latest Treasury Department guidance.
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The IRS is investigating the tax-exempt status of the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) following its reporting on President Joe Biden’s nominees, several of whom withdrew their nominations, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The IRS is requesting AAF submit internal financial data as well as communications, including meeting notes, publications and newsletters, according to the letter from the IRS to AAF obtained by the DCNF. The conservative nonprofit organization, which the IRS approved for tax-exempt status in August 2021, alleges the investigation is in retaliation for the AAF reporting on several recent Biden nominees who later withdrew their nominations.
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The IRS commissioner announced last month that the agency will now deploy artificial intelligence in pursuit of “wealthy tax cheats” who are using partnership structures to pay “little to no tax.” But the announcement’s logic doesn’t pass the smell test — the real intent seems to be to intimidate successful small businesspeople away from using legal tax minimization strategies.
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An IRS agent showed up at the door of a Marion County, Ohio, woman and lied about his reason for being there.
Once inside, the Internal Revenue Service agent, purporting to be named Bill Haus, began to harass and intimidate the taxpayer, according to a congressional report released Friday.
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The Internal Revenue Service recently awarded a lucrative contract to help modernize its computer databases to the same Washington firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, that employed the man who pleaded guilty last week to stealing and leaking thousands of private tax returns of wealthy Americans, including former President Trump, according to records reviewed by RealClearInvestigations.
The massive IRS theft is the third major breach of confidential and classified government information by Booz Allen contractors over the last decade – including Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak exposing the National Security Agency’s worldwide anti-terror surveillance program.
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced new enforcement initiatives Friday to crack down on 1,600 millionaires and 75 large companies it said owe hundreds of millions in unpaid taxes.
IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel said the agency will use Inflation Reduction Act funding to focus on high-income earners, partnerships, large corporations and promoters. He said the IRS won’t increase audit rates for those earning less than $400,000 a year.
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The Internal Revenue Service lost millions of taxpayer records and federal employees don’t know where they have gone.
Lawmakers want answers and accountability for the IRS over those documents, which could be used by nefarious actors to steal Americans’ identity.
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A complaint filed with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) alleges that the founder of the largest Democratic dark money network in the country is using its operations for his own financial benefit.
Fox News reports that the complaint was filed on Tuesday by Americans for Public Trust (APT), and targets any entities that are affiliated with Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm based out of Washington D.C. which manages numerous nonprofits serving as fiscal sponsors for left-wing dark money groups.
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The IRS on Monday said it is ending its decades-long practice of agency revenue officers making unannounced visits to taxpayers, citing concerns over agent safety and an increase in scammers.
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Several Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation which would disarm enforcement agents from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Labor (DOL) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana introduced the No Funds for Armed Regulators Act of 2023 on June 30, joined by seven co-sponsors. The bill would disallow the use of taxpayer dollars to hire or retain armed regulatory enforcement agents in the EPA, DOL and IRS if it becomes law.
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President Joe Biden, the Biden grifting conglomerate, the Department of Justice, and the FBI under its fourth consecutive weaponized director, are in danger of subverting the American system of law.
They are in various ways undermining the tradition of self-reported income tax computation and voluntary compliance.
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The House Ways and Means Committee took final steps Tuesday to release to the public as early as this week the testimony and evidence from an IRS whistleblower who alleges the Justice Department gave favorable treatment to Hunter Biden and engaged in political interference in the criminal tax case against the first son.
Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., scheduled an executive session for 8 a.m. Thursday where lawmakers are expected to vote to free the whistleblower evidence and testimony of IRS supervisory criminal agent Gary Shapley from the 6103 privacy requirements that normally shield Americans’ tax information from public disclosure.
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Benjamin Franklin famously wrote in 1789 that “our new Constitution is now established and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Death and taxes are fated. However, are enormous tax hikes also a fait accompli? Is it a certainty – ‘an accomplished fact’ – that the White House and Congress will repeal tax reforms that worked? Tax breaks that helped small business owners and families.
For the past several days Americans have been scrambling to make the deadline to complete their 2022 tax returns. Most taxpayers will be relieved once the ordeal is done. However, here’s an unfortunate reality: if Washington fails to act, the federal tax code is headed for major changes in just a couple of years, including massive tax hikes on families and small businesses.
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In a statement on Thursday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) declared that it will hire almost 30,000 new employees over the next two years, as part of an $80 billion investment plan.
As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the moves are part of the agency’s broader Strategic Operating Plan, aimed at increasing its workforce and implementing new technologies for the alleged purpose of increased efficiency, stricter tax enforcement, and improved customer service.
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President Joe Biden’s call for funding for 87,000 IRS agents to audit Americans has raised questions about whether the new rash of auditing will target poorer Americans or be politically motivated.
The Inflation Reduction Act included $80 billion to beef up IRS efforts, which Biden says will more than pay for itself in new audits.
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The new head of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee blasted the Biden administration for giving few answers after thousands of taxpayer files were leaked to an outside group.
House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., sent a letter to Russel George, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration, raising concerns about the leak of “confidential tax information” and the lack of accountability over that leak.
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The IRS this week warned taxpayers about its new $600 reporting threshold for third-party payments and the need to fill out a 1099-K form should taxpayers exceed that limit.
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Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate former president Donald Trump’s possession of classified information, was a key figure in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)’s infamous targeting of conservative non-profits, according to a 2014 report by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.
On Oct. 8, 2010, Smith, then-Chief of the DOJ Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section at the time, called a meeting with former IRS official Lois Lerner “to discuss how the IRS could assist in the criminal enforcement of campaign-finance laws against politically active nonprofits,” according to testimony from Richard Pilger, then director of the section’s Election Crimes Branch and subordinate of Smith’s, to the Oversight Committee. Lerner eventually resigned from the IRS in 2015 following criticism of her targeting of conservative groups when denying or delaying tax-exempt status.
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August 7 was a big day for the Spendthrift Seven. In just 12 hours, these Senate Democrats — all facing re-election Tuesday — gave the middle finger to middle-class taxpayers, hugged illegal aliens, and high-fived the IRS.
Arizona’s Mark Kelly, Colorado’s Michael Bennet, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Washington’s Patty Murray did these things while the Senate considered President Joe Biden’s deceptively titled, 273-page Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Their votes should appall every American.
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) increased the individual tax deductible for 2023 at the highest rate in more than 35 years due to inflation.
Individual tax deductibles increased by $900 to $13,850, up $1,800 to $27,700 for married couples filing jointly, a roughly 7% increase compared to tax year 2022, the IRS announced Tuesday. This increase is the largest hike since 1985, when tax brackets were first tied to inflation, The Washington Post reported.
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New figures from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) show that the number of American citizens who report more than $1 million in income have jumped by a staggering 41 percent this year alone.
As reported by Politico, the IRS claims to have processed up to 387,840 returns reporting seven-figure incomes by mid-July; at the same time last year, the agency only found 274,879. The increase has been attributed to a strong performance on Wall Street last year, before the inflation crisis hit; in 2022 thus far, millionaires reported a collective total of $252.5 billion in capital gains, 80 percent higher compared to the previous year. In addition, millionaires’ salaries and wages rose by 45 percent.
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President Joe Biden sparked controversy for pushing through Congress increased federal funding for 87,000 new IRS employees to audit Americans, but Republican leadership has pledged to overturn that expansion if they win the majority.
House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., pledged at a Pennsylvania event to “repeal” the IRS expansion.
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The conservative Landmark Legal Foundation (LLF) has asked the IRS to audit the second-largest teachers union in the United States for allegedly misreporting its political spending.
In a letter to the IRS, which the Washington Examiner obtained, the group alleges that the American Federation of Teachers inaccurately claimed that it did not “engage in direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office” on their Form 990s from 2016-2019.
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Georgia is giving more than $62.4 million in federal COVID relief money to groups fighting homelessness and housing insecurity worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The state is allocating American Rescue Plan and State Fiscal Recovery Fund dollars to the 20 projects receiving money.
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Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a video showing potential IRS agents training Friday and urged Americans to notice a billionaire wasn’t the target.
“Notice the scenario in this IRS recruiting program is ‘taking down a landscape business owner who failed to properly report how he paid for his vehicles,’ not ‘taking down a billionaire who uses the corporate jet for private trips,’” Massie posted.
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Republican nominee Mark Gonsalves (R-GA-07) called the proposition for IRS expansion made by the Biden administration “the definition of runaway democracy” and criticized his opponent, Lucy McBath, for her support of the incumbent president.
“Tuesday Trivia fact that’s real, believe it or not. Under Joe Biden, the IRS staff will be larger than the combined totals of the FBI, the Pentagon, the Border Patrol, and the State Department. That is the definition of runaway democracy,” Gonsalves said in reference the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
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One day after FBI agents raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that the Internal Revenue Service must hand over the former president’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee.
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Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz has introduced a bill to disarm the Internal Revenue Service.
Along with fellow Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Jeff Duncan (S.C.), and Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Gaetz is pushing the “Disarm the IRS Act,” which would prohibit the IRS from acquiring (by purchase or otherwise) any ammunition.
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The Internal Revenue Service has been under fire for delays and millions of backlogged returns, but now lawmakers are raising the alarm after the federal agency “destroyed” millions of Americans’ tax documents.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig this week asking for answers about why these records were destroyed.
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For decades, states like New York, California and Illinois have evidently been paying a high price for allowing dues-hungry labor union bosses to continue getting workers fired for refusal to bankroll their organizations. Year after year, far more taxpayers have been leaving forced-unionism states than have been moving into them. The cumulative loss of taxpayers has been cutting into their revenue bases.
Recently released data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) indicate the cost of forced unionism soared by more than 50% in the Tax Filing Year 2019, compared to the year before.
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The Internal Revenue Service is warning taxpayers of several tax scams.
The scams cover four transactions involving charitable remainder annuity trusts, Maltese individual retirement arrangements, foreign captive insurance, and monetized installment sales.
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New tax filings from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reveal that the official Black Lives Matter organization ended the last fiscal year with at least $42 million in assets.
According to the Associated Press, the 63-page Form 990 shows that Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc. peaked with over $90 million in donations in 2020, amid race riots that destroyed cities all across the country, which were largely orchestrated and led by BLM. Of that $90 million, the organization invested at least $32 million in stocks.
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An inspector general’s report reveals that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) handed out as much as $64 million in stimulus funding to dead people after Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law.
Just The News reports that the massive oversight was due to a computer error that the IRS was aware of but did not fix at the time. Ultimately, nearly 45,000 total payments were sent to Americans with deceased dependents who died before January 1st, 2021.
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Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are pressuring the Internal Revenue Service over ongoing problems and unaddressed issues from last year’s filing season even as this year’s season is in full swing.
A bipartisan group of more than 100 lawmakers from the U.S. House and Senate sent a letter to the IRS raising concerns about “continued confusion” and “numerous problems” with the agency.
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will soon require taxpayers to submit a scan of their face in order to access certain features and tax records.
The change, first reported on by Krebs on Security, will force users to sign into the IRS website through an account with third-party firm ID.me, and provide a government identification document with their photo alongside a selfie to verify their identity, according to the IRS website.
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Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS), an independent watchdog within the Internal Revenue Service, released a 2021 report to Congress stating that tens of millions of taxpayers had a “horrendous” experience with customer service, including the worst phone service “ever” and long delays for refunds.
“Calendar year 2021 was surely the most challenging year taxpayers and tax professionals have ever experienced – long processing and refund delays, difficulty reaching the IRS by phone, correspondence that went unprocessed for many months, collection notices issued while taxpayer correspondence was awaiting processing, limited or no information on the Where’s My Refund? tool for delayed returns, and – for full disclosure – difficulty obtaining timely assistance from TAS,” the report stated.
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A Chicago-based nonprofit funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to local election offices in what critics charge was a bid to elect Democrats in the 2020 elections, newly released IRS filings show.
The Center for Technology and Civic Life’s IRS Form 990 filing for 2020, which Just the News obtained, reveals thousands of grants to election offices across the country. IRS 990s detail where organizations received and spent money.
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Included in the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act currently before the U.S. Senate is a proposal to allocate $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service to hire nearly 87,000 additional agents – a plan opposed by a majority of voters recently polled.
The BBBA proposal also comes after numerous reports show years of examples of agency problems costing taxpayer money.
According to a new HarrisX poll, 58% of likely voters said they think increased enforcement would impact middle class taxpayers the most; 23% said it would only impact the wealthy.
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A group of House Democrats on Wednesday called for a tax reporting proposal included in the Build Back Better Act to be scrapped, citing concerns over privacy.
“Americans expect their bank or credit union to safeguard their financial information,” the Democrats wrote in a letter addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal. “This proposal would erode trust in financial services providers.”
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The entire Democrat multi-trillion dollar socialist spending scam is bad for Americans, and bad for our economy. One particular provision that is especially terrible is their “IRS Surveillance” program, which would grant the government access to spy on nearly every Americans’ bank accounts. Their bill wants to use $80 billion of taxpayer funds to hire 85,000 more bureaucrats, nearly doubling the size of the IRS, to go through individuals’ personal banking information.
President Biden, and his colleagues in Congress, must have realized how unpopular this policy was with the American people, so they decided to make some “changes.” They created the impression they were raising the threshold in transactions individuals would need to hit before triggering the IRS to spy on their personal banking accounts.
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The Biden administration is making changes to its plan to require banks to report to the IRS on all accounts with at least $600, but banks say those changes are not enough.
Biden has pitched increasing federal tax revenue through more auditing and a stricter IRS as a way to help fund his proposed trillions in federal spending. His initial plan to require reporting of all $600 accounts sparked major controversy.
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Gov. Brian Kemp and Georgia’s business and banking community are pushing back against a federal proposal that would allow the IRS to monitor bank accounts with more than $600.
The plan is part of Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending bill currently being considered in Congress. Kemp and leaders of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia Bankers Association said it violates most Georgians’ privacy.
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Gov. Brian Kemp and Georgia’s business and banking community are pushing back against a federal proposal that would allow the IRS to monitor bank accounts with more than $600.
The plan is part of Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending bill currently being considered in Congress. Kemp and leaders of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia Bankers Association said it violates most Georgians’ privacy.
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Most IRS guidance documents make for poor pleasure reading. Then again, most IRS guidance doesn’t effectively impose a retroactive tax on small business owners merely for having a family. IRS Notice 2021-49, issued on August 4, includes a bizarre interpretation of the law that will effectively raise taxes for business owners with close relatives, even if their family members have no involvement in the company.
A core goal of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed early on in the pandemic was to assist businesses in keeping employees on their payroll even as they dealt with the economic effects of lockdowns. Part of the plan was the Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC), which provides a tax credit against employer payroll tax liabilities.
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