IRS ‘Crowdfunding’? $46 Million in Refunds Sent to To 24K People At One Address
The Internal Revenue Service sent $46.3 million in tax refunds to nearly 24,000 persons supposedly living at one Atlanta address through the 2011 processing year.
Wonder how many bathrooms were at that house?
During the same time frame, the IRS also sent about 17,000 refunds to three other Atlanta addresses to the tune of about $6 million. Nearly 6,000 Taxpayer Identification Numbers were pegged to those three locations. It also issued refunds totaling $10.3 million to one address in Oxnard, Calif., where about 2,500 tax filers supposedly lived.
This unusual pattern of “crowded living conditions” and big refunds also occurred in Raleigh, N.C., Phoenix, Palm Beach, Fla., and San Jose, Calif. among other locations. Many of these people apparently even used the same bank account number and yet the IRS continued to send out the money.
As just brought forth by CNS News, these incredible revelations were included in a Treasury Department Inspector General audit of fraud in the Taxpayer Identification Number program prompted by two IRS whistleblowers. TINs are often issued to illegal aliens who are ineligible to obtain Social Security Numbers. You need either an SSN or a TIN to file a tax return.
The report states that the IGl’s office “substantiated many of the allegations set forth in the IRS employees’ complaints. The complaints alleged that IRS management is not concerned with addressing questionable applications and is interested only in the volume of applications that can be processed, regardless of whether they are fraudulent.”
According to the report, IRS management was aware of the problem involving the abuse of the TIN program for years but never implemented the appropriate protocols to rout out fraud. Inspector General J. Russell George said at the time the report was originally released that “[The] audit found that IRS management has not established adequate internal controls to detect and prevent the assignment of an ITIN to individuals submitting questionable applications. Even more troubling, TIGTA found an environment which discourages employees from detecting fraudulent applications. To their credit, the IRS recently announced a series of improvements that will take effect immediately on an interim basis, in response to our findings. It is to be hoped that significant, systematic change, rather than interim improvements, will take place.”
The IRS is also under investigation for illegally targeting Tea Party and other politically conservative groups for heavy scrutiny and also for wasting millions on lavish employee conferences. The agency is scheduled to gain access to Americans’ personal health records when Obamacare goes into implementation in 2014. Despite the sequester, unionized IRS employees are set to receive $70 million in bonuses .
Do you have confidence in the IRS that it is operating fairly and efficiently?
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