Free Republic

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. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa and House Ways and Means Chair Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel raising concerns about the IRS’ inventory of taxpayer records. “The IRS’s lackadaisical attitude towards the loss of millions of taxpayer records containing Social Security numbers, addresses, and other sensitive tax return information is appalling,” the letter said. “The...

A new report released from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) showed that the Internal Revenue Service failed to correct issues found in earlier pandemic benefit programs and ended up sending Recovery Rebate Credit payments to deceased or otherwise ineligible individuals in the latest round of aid resulting from the American Rescue Plan. According to the TIGTA's final audit report issued last week, "the IRS issued more than 1.2 million payments totaling $1.9 billion to potentially ineligible individuals," and blamed the improper payments on "deficiencies TIGTA previously reported based on its review of the IRS’s implementation of the...

The IRS failed to adequately store, backup, and search official records for use in Freedom of Information requests and other litigation, according to a new report released by the Treasury Inspector General of Tax Administration. Performing an independent audit, TIGTA found: The IRS’s current e-mail system and record retention policies do not ensure that e-mail records are saved and can be searched and retrieved for as long as needed. Additionally, repeated changes in electronic media storage policies, combined with a reliance on employees to maintain records on computer hard drives, has resulted in cases in which Federal records were lost...

Full title: Federal Court Orders IRS to Produce Newly Recovered Lois Lerner Emails, IRS Fails to Meet Court Deadline (Washington, DC ) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton announced today that Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the IRS last week to begin producing, every Monday, nearly 1,800 newly recovered Lois Lerner emails. Judge Sullivan ruled on the matter from the bench during a status conference on July 1, 2015. Despite the court order, the IRS failed to produce any Lois Lerner emails yesterday. The IRS also failed to provide Judicial Watch a status of the Lois Lerner email production issues, as...

An inspector general investigating the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups has found thousands of emails from Lois Lerner, the agency official at the center of that controversy, according to committees involved in the probe. Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said it found roughly 6,400 emails either to or from Lerner from between 2004 and 2013 that it didn’t think the IRS had turned over to lawmakers, the congressional committees said. The committees have yet to examine the emails, aides on Capitol Hill said. The IRS said last year that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, leaving it...

The Obama administration is refusing to publicly release more than 500 documents on the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups. Twenty months after the IRS scandal broke, there are still many unanswered questions about who was spearheading the agency’s scrutiny of conservative-leaning organizations. The Hill sought access to government documents that might provide a glimpse of the decision-making through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The Hill asked for 2013 emails and other correspondence between the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The request specifically sought emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner and Treasury...

A new audit-report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) shows that the IRS sent at least 343 potentially fraudulent tax returns in 2011 to the same, single address in Shanghai, China, for a total of $156,533 in tax refunds. The same report also shows that 655 potentially fraudulent tax refunds totaling $220,489 were sent to the same address in Kaunas, Lithuania. Other potentially fraudulent refunds, 580 of them, were sent to the same address in Orlando, Fla.; 355 to the same address in Lakewood, Colo; and another 291 to another single address in Orlando, Fla. In total,...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The IRS is unable to account for $67 million spent from a slush fund established for Obamacare implementation, according to a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) report released today. The “Health Insurance Reform Implementation Fund” (HIRIF) was tucked into Obamacare in order to give the IRS money to enforce the tax provisions of the healthcare law. The fund, totaling some $1 billion of taxpayer money, was used to roll out enforcement mechanisms for the approximately 50 tax provisions of Obamacare. According to the report: “Specifically, the IRS did not account for or attempt to quantify...

One of the most important and so-far least noted threads in the IRS sandal cloth is the inexplicable remark made by Austan Goolsbee, at the time the Chairman of the White Council of Economic Advisors about the taxes paid by the Koch brothers - arch villains in the Manichean delusions of the American left - that would require his knowledge of their confidential tax returns. Did the White House senior staff illegally browse through the tax records of their political enemies? The Washington Free Beacon has been trying to find out, and uncovered an interesting response: CJ Ciaramella reports: The...

IRS supervisors ignored employees who tried to warn agency higher-ups of fraud in a program designed to collect taxes from immigrants, resulting in the agency paying out potentially bogus refunds, according to an official audit released Wednesday. The Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said the IRS is too focused on getting out refunds quickly rather than getting them only to qualified taxpayers. Auditors also said the agency eliminated some methods employees had used to figure out questionable refund requests and doesn’t have the right training or tools to screen out bogus identity documents when immigrants apply for taxpayer...