Many IRS Seizures Are Illegal, Government Report Concludes

Spread the love

Forbes:

For the beleaguered IRS, the hits just keep on coming. After the targeting scandal, a key IRS official claimed the Fifth Amendment. House Committee Votes IRS Official Must Testify Despite Fifth Amendtment. Then there were all the expense issues, including Star Trek, Gilligan’s Island and line dancing videos.

Then there were the abused credit cards. Who wouldn’t like a charge card with bills direct to Uncle Sam? See Audit Finds $119 of Unused Nerf Footballs in IRS Cabinet. A watchdog report says there’s little oversight.

But now, the increasingly popular Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reveals that 30% of IRS Seizures of Taxpayer Property don’t comply with the law. The report has an inglorious title but is worth a look: Fiscal Year 2013 Review of Compliance With Legal Guidelines When Conducting Seizures of Taxpayers’ Property.

Taking a taxpayer’s property for unpaid tax is called a “seizure.” Like any debt collector, the IRS can and does enforce collection in some cases. But there are many legal safeguards.

In fact, after a pendulum swing to a more aggressive IRS, in 1998 the IRS had its wings clipped. To ensure that taxpayers’ rights are protected, in 1998 Congress amended part of the tax code that deals with seizures. I.R.C. §§ 6330 through 6344. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is required to evaluate the IRS annually. One big area is to inspect IRS ’s seizures.

So are taxpayer rights being violated? It turns out they are. TIGTA reviewed a random sample of 50 of 738 seizures conducted from July 1, 2011, through June 30, 2012. What did it reveal?

0 0 votes

Article Rating

Name*

Email*

1 Comment

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

Ditto

11 years ago

The IRS Mistakenly Exposed Thousands of Social Security Numbers

The incident involves the unwitting exposure of “tens of thousands” of Social Security numbers, according to a recent audit by the independent transparency and public-domain group Public.Resource.org. The identifying numbers were on the Internet for less than 24 hours after being discovered, but the damage was done. And unfortunately, the data-breach concerns some of the most sensitive types of transactions: Those made by nonprofit political groups known as 527s.

Every so often, 527s have to file tax forms to the IRS, which then get added to a database. The database itself is hardly a secret; the IRS has been sending updated records routinely to Public.Resource.org and other public-interest groups, and it’s a favorite among political reporters. But when the IRS told the group’s founder, Carl Malamud, to disregard the Form 990-Ts included in the agency’s January release, he took a closer look at the files in question.

After analyzing the breach, Malamud wrote a letter to the IRS pointing out 10 instances where a social security number was accidentally revealed on the government’s website—just a small sample of the larger breach.

Just the day before, Malamud had filed another letter to the agency describing a problem with the 990-Ts. Of over 3,000 tax returns contained in the January update, 319 contained sensitive data the agency should have scrubbed, Malamud wrote in the July 1 report that he filed to the inspector general’s office. In that mixup, some 2,319 social security numbers—perhaps more—were revealed.