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The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee announced on Thursday night that hundreds of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s previously “lost” backup tapes have been recovered, which could result in the recovery of a new trove of her emails. IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on Thursday that it took investigators just two weeks to recover 424 backup tapes that were previously said to be unretrievable. “To date, we have found 32,744 unique emails that were backed up from Lois Lerner’s email box. We are in the process of comparing these emails to what...

The White House told Congress last week it refused to dig into its computers for emails that could shed light on what kinds of private taxpayer information the IRS shares with President Obama’s top aides, assuring Congress that the IRS will address the issue — eventually.

Thousands of new Internal Revenue Service employees will not be shouldering the regulatory burden Obamacare rules have heaped onto the tax agency, despite IRS claims that it needed massive additional funding to hire such support staff. Only 483 of the 9,245 new hires President Obama is seeking for the IRS in his 2016 budget proposal would be assigned to work on Obamacare programs, according to a budget summary published by the federal tax agency. As the agency tasked with enforcing Obamacare’s individual mandate provision, the IRS must for the first time this year assess a fine against people who were...

When Carole Hinders answered a knock at the front door of her home in August 2013, she was confronted by two IRS agents. They told her they had just cleaned out the entire bank account of the restaurant, Mrs. Lady’s Mexican Food, that Hinders had owned and operated in tiny Spirit Lake, Iowa, for the past 30 years. The IRS seized more than $32,000. (snip) The aggressive tactics adopted by law enforcement in structuring cases are, perhaps, unsurprising given that the proceeds of forfeited property are funneled back to the very agencies responsible for the forfeiture — an arrangement that...

The IRS has apologized for stealing, or rather seizing, the back accounts of small businesses that did nothing other than deposit an improper amount of cash into their accounts. Pressured by Congress, the IRS has apologized for seizing banks accounts from otherwise law-abiding business owners simply because those owners structured bank transactions to avoid federal reporting requirements. The Associated Press reports “IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress Wednesday that the IRS is changing policies to prevent the seizures, as long as the money came from legal means.” Civil asset forfeiture is a government racket where “suspicious” deposits at one’s banking...

IRS practiced a ‘seize first, ask questions later’ strategyThe Internal Revenue Service seized hundreds of millions of dollars from thousands of bank accounts over the past decade, often without proof of any criminal wrongdoing, according to a report released by the Institute for Justice this week.The Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, said the IRS practiced a “seize first, ask questions later” strategy when it seized $242 million in more than 2,500 cases from 2005 to 2012.All of those seizures were for “structuring” violations, an obscure rule intended to keep money launderers, terrorists, and other criminals from making small...

U.S. Senate Follows JW Lead on Obamacare FraudObama IRS Obstructs Justice?Election Integrity Battle Moves to Supreme CourtU.S. Senate Follows JW Lead on Obamacare Fraud Someone on Capitol Hill has taken notice of the lawsuit we filed last fall challenging members of Congress who are taking advantage of health benefits they are not entitled to claim. That someone is Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) who now chairs the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee. As a prominent figure in the new Republican majority, Vitter is well-positioned to investigate and expose illegal maneuverings that make it possible for elected officials, and their staff members,...

Commissioner John Koskinen confirmed Tuesday that illegal immigrants granted amnesty from deportation under President Obama’s new policies would be able to get extra refunds from the IRS for money they earned while working illegally, as long as they filed returns during those years. Illegal immigrants who are granted the amnesty will be given official Social Security numbers, which means they can go back and amend up to three years of previous tax forms to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, potentially claiming billions of dollars in additional payments they were ineligible for before the amnesty.

mmigration: Aliens granted executive amnesty by President Obama will be eligible for tax credits for the years they worked here illegally. But wasn't amnesty supposed to benefit the economy and not drain the U.S. Treasury? Subverting the Constitution to grant millions of illegal aliens work permits and freedom from deportation apparently isn't enough for the Obama administration. It now intends, through the Internal Revenue Service, to subvert the tax code to let these illegals collect billions in retroactive Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) payments. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, an unindicted co-conspirator in the cover-up of the IRS Tea Party targeting...

Hundreds of former Internal Revenue Service employees who had a history of misconduct and poor performance on the job were rehired by the tax agency, including some who had committed fraud or falsified documents. The previously cited IRS staff included 141 employees who had problems paying their own taxes, the agency’s inspector general said in a report made public Thursday. Several had “willfully failed to file their federal tax returns,” the report said. The IRS hired more than 7,000 former employees between January 2010 and September 2013. Of the 824 who returned to the agency despite their checkered work history,...

Remember the IRS computer crashes and the hunt for those long destroyed lost emails of Lois Lerner? Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas introduced a bill he called the “The Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Act,” to allow us all to try out some excuses. Rep. Stockman said, “Taxpayers should be allowed to offer the same flimsy, obviously made-up excuses the Obama administration uses.” The bill would allow taxpayers who do not provide documents requested by the IRS to claim one of the following reasons: 1. The dog ate my tax receipts. 2. Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction. 3. Traded documents...

The IRS has unveiled a secure web application, the International Data Exchange Service (IDES), for cross-border data sharing. IDES will allow Foreign Financial Institutions (FFIs) and tax authorities from other countries to transmit financial data on U.S. taxpayers’ accounts, via an encrypted pathway, to the IRS. The tool is part of the IRS’s effort to track U.S. taxpayer income globally. It is intended to assist FFIs and foreign tax authorities in their compliance with the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). The act requires that financial institutions send to the IRS financial information of American account holders or face...

To comply with unconstitutional pseudo-treaties negotiated by the Obama administration without the consent of Congress or any semblance of constitutional authority, the IRS announced that it will be sharing private financial information on U.S. bank account holders with foreign powers. No warrant is needed for foreign governments or tyrants to peruse the sensitive information at will — including brutal communist regimes and possibly even criminals or hackers.

Seven months after federal officials fired CGI Federal for its botched work on Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, the IRS awarded the same company a $4.5 million IT contract for its new Obamacare tax program. CGI is a $10.5 billion Montreal-based company that has forever been etched into the public’s mind as the company behind the bungled Obamacare main website. After facing a year of embarrassing failures, federal officials finally pulled the plug on the company and terminated CGI’s contract in January 2014. Yet on Aug. 11, seven months later, IRS officials signed a new contract with CGI to provide “critical functions”...

Seven months after federal officials fired CGI Federal for its botched work on Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, the IRS awarded the same company a $4.5 million IT contract for its new Obamacare tax program. CGI is a $10.5 billion Montreal-based company that has forever been etched into the public’s mind as the company behind the bungled Obamacare main website. After facing a year of embarrassing failures, federal officials finally pulled the plug on the company and terminated CGI’s contract in January 2014. Yet on Aug. 11, seven months later, IRS officials signed a new contract with CGI to provide “critical functions”...

As Stephen Moore at Fox News reports, the IRS has some big changes planned for for you in 2015. They’re finally going to eliminate all the scandals and abuse and become more accountable to the public! Hurrah! No… I was just kidding. They’re going to be delivering even worse service than they already provide. Complaining about belt tightening budget cuts, this week IRS Commissioner John Koskinen lectured: “People who file paper tax returns could wait an extra week—or possibly longer—to see their refund. Taxpayers with errors or questions on their returns that require additional manual review will also face...

The IRS scandal is not much in the news these days, but it is not going away. The more Obama’s minions stonewall this scandal, the more congressional Democrats discount the scandal, the more the leftist establishment media ignores this scandal, the more toxic it will be for the left. In late November we learned that 30,000 of Lois Lerner’s lost e-mails have been found, but these e-mails have not yet been converted into readable form. The utter contempt the Obama administration shows toward the oversight powers of Congress, toward the millions of information technology-savvy Americans who grasp the lying and...

In a shocking revelation, the Treasury Inspector General has identified some 2,500 documents that “potentially” show taxpayer information held by the Internal Revenue Service being shared with President Obama’s White House.

IRS Accused Of Sharing 2,500 Private Taxpayer Documents With White House By Cheryl K. Chumley November 28, 2014 The Internal Revenue Service may have given thousands of confidential filings from private taxpayers to the White House to review, a lawsuit against the Treasury Department just revealed. The suit, filed against Treasury’s inspector general by Cause of Action, a legal advocacy outfit, reveals a steady stream of communication went on between the White House and the IRS — a potentially “improper” stream, the group alleged, The Daily Caller reported.

Up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever. The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) informed congressional staffers from several committees on Friday that the emails were found among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that were used to back up the IRS email system. “They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes,” a congressional aide told the Washington Examiner.