Free Republic

With so much going on these days — on multiple fronts — it's difficult to keep up with it all. On Tuesday alone, there were multiple cabinet secretaries testifying before Congress, President Donald Trump made multiple appearances, commenting on everything from trade to FIFA, the Houthis cried "Uncle!", and India and Pakistan appear primed to bust out into an all-out war. All of which is to say: I didn't have an opportunity to watch Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's testimony before the House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee oversight hearing live. But looking back over some of the key...

To crack down on Pentagon spending, the Defense Department adopted a program in 2015 to track spending on lodging and entertainment. But so few officials used the Visa government travel charge card that nearly 4 million card transactions worth $1.2 billion couldn’t be reviewed in enough detail to check for misuse, abuse, and fraud, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General said last month. The travel card failure is just one example of why the Pentagon has never passed an annual financial audit. Since the 1990s, every federal agency has been subject to audits, but the Pentagon refused to conduct any...

The party of “norms” and “decency” strikes again. We will never back down.

Democrats are prepared to shut down the federal government during next month’s spending fight after becoming enraged over the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) financial audit of government spending. The Democrats’ tactic puts them into a precarious position of supporting waste, fraud, and abuse, three items DOGE is tasked with cutting. “I cannot support efforts that will continue this lawlessness that we’re seeing when it comes to this administration’s actions,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And for us to be able to support government funding in that way only for them to turn it...

Before getting to the announcement, let me first answer a repeated question. “Why is it so easy for DOGE to identify wasteful spending?” ..in simple form.When the trillion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was passed, those “shovel ready jobs” in fiscal year 2009, that was the last year of a full federal budget. Every budget year thereafter has been a process of continuing resolutions and omnibus spending. Within the CR process they use “baseline budgeting,” which essentially accepts all prior spending as the starting point for the next spending allotment within the Continuing Resolution process.That means, the $1 trillion...

Chris Murphy: "We don't pledge allegiance to the creepy 22 year olds working for Elon Musk. We pledge allegiance to the United States of America."

Complex and critically important systems, ranging from the financial sector to elections, need to be able to have outcomes validated through audits. Holding accurate elections is a core principle under our Constitution and the law, as is auditability, though you might not have thought about it. The unique right of all Americans is to collectively exercise sovereignty over our government. The founders believed this was a divine right granted by our Creator. Since 1803, after the peculiar case of political skullduggery in Marbury v. Madison, it has been established law that a right without a remedy is not a right....

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of the Treasury for unlawfully concealing records regarding the Biden Administration’s plans for race-based tax audits. Congress prohibits the IRS from collecting data on taxpayer race and ethnicity directly and from acquiring such data indirectly from other agencies. However, to advance the “equity” cult, the Biden Administration simply steamrolled the law. On May 18, 2021, the Department’s Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo said that “racial equity” was a key factor in the Administration’s “design of tax compliance.” On December 14, 2021,...

As Americans file returns this season, some worry about IRS audits amid agency efforts to ramp up service, technology and enforcement. Recent IRS enforcement has targeted high-income individuals, large corporations and complex partnerships. But everyday filers could still face an audit — and certain issues are more prone to IRS scrutiny, experts say. You don’t want to face the “audit lottery,” warned Ryan Losi, a certified public accountant and executive vice president of CPA firm Piascik. Audit rates of individual income tax returns decreased for all income levels from tax years 2010 to 2019, largely due to lower IRS funding,...

As red states pass laws to mandate and strengthen post-election hand counts and audits in an effort to restore public faith in election integrity, a watchdog is warning that such measures could "validate fraud instead of catch it" if underlying issues are ignored. Amid suspicions of irregularities during the 2020 presidential election, some counties and states turned to hand-counting ballots and audits to help determine if there was election fraud. High-visibility audits of that election included those conducted in Fulton County, Ga., and Maricopa County, Ariz. Those audits uncovered significant issues with ballots but reaffirmed the outcome of the tallies...

The IRS hopes to increase tax audits on the wealthiest taxpayers tenfold under the Biden administration’s plan for the agency, according to a senior administration official and the IRS’s new strategic operating plan. IRS and Treasury Department officials said Thursday that they will use $80 billion in new funding for the tax service to claw back unpaid balances from high-income earners and complex businesses — restoring audits on those taxpayers to higher rates from more than a decade ago — and boost customer service resources for middle- and low-income tax filers. The agency plans to digitize its tax-processing pipeline and...

Joe Biden just can’t stop lying about his policies that have crushed the American people.How long has he been telling us that he only wants to go after the “rich” people with his phalanx of thousands of new IRS agents? A long time it seems. Anyone who knows Joe Biden knows what malarkey his claim truly is and we’ve pointed out some of the lies surrounding this claim in the past. But Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finally admitted under grilling on Friday by Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE), the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee, that 90 percent...

Treasury Department Secretary Janet Yellen acknowledged on Friday that 90 percent of IRS audits will be conducted on small businesses and families, not billionaires. Testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) questioned Yellen on the ambiguity of her opening statement. Smith prefaced his question by noting the 87,000 new IRS agents hired at the agency over the next decade to conduct tax enforcement on Americans. “Regarding the audits, there has been confusion about the meaning of the directive that you cited,” Smith said in his line of questioning. “Are you talking about the total number...

Attorney General Merrick Garland made an unannounced visit to Ukraine, where he reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to assist Ukrainian officials in pursuing war criminals, Fox News Digital confirmed. On Friday, March 3rd, Garland made the surprise to Lviv, Ukraine at the invitation of the Ukrainian prosecutor general to join President Volodymyr Zelensky at the "United for Justice Conference," Justice Department officials confirmed. Garland's trip was not disclosed "for security reasons."

The new Republican-controlled House of Representatives got off to a bumpy start by attempting to repeal last year’s addition of of $71.5 billion to the IRS budget. It’s a political stunt with no chance of passing the U.S. Senate. Hamstringing the taxman doesn’t make taxes go away, but it does make it harder for taxpayers to pay them, the government to collect them and public agencies to function. Defunding the IRS would aggravate an already egregious problem: Billions of dollars of uncollected taxes, mostly from corporations and the wealthy. From 2014 to 2016, the IRS estimated $500 billion per year...

Despite $80 billion in new funding, the agency is living up to its reputation of hassling low-income taxpayers over rich people...On Wednesday, Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released data provided to it by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on audits performed by the agency in fiscal year 2022. Despite the infusion of new funding earmarked for the IRS via last year's Inflation Reduction Act, the agency continued historic trends of hassling primarily low-income taxpayers, with relatively few millionaires and billionaires getting caught up in the audit sweep."The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times...

Despite a 1996 law requiring all federal agencies to conduct regular spending audits, the Pentagon has so far failed to conduct a single one. While US lawmakers have pressed the DoD to comply by September of 2017, a new inspector general’s report indicates that meeting this deadline is highly unlikely. Army and Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis personnel did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter adjustments and $6.5 trillion in year-end adjustments made to Army General Fund (AGF) data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation," the report reads. In common language, the Pentagon has no idea how...

President Biden's administration is scrambling to track the nearly $20 billion in military aid it has sent to Ukraine as Republicans warn of impending audits when they take control of the House in January. Likely future House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has said his party will not be giving Ukraine a "blank check" to fend off Russia's invasion. A potential audit would determine how much, if any, of the U.S. aid is ending up in the wrong hands. The Biden administration's previous tracking efforts have inspected only a fraction of the aid provided to the country. While some staunch Ukraine allies...

We’ve known for a long time the election systems are used to cheat. Kill Chain was popular on HBO long before the 2020 election where the numbers were screwed deliberately to steal the election for Biden. Democrats were very loud in their condemnation of the machines, the machines, the machines back when they didn’t like the result of elections. Many times hacking and security experts demonstrated how easy it would be to hack into a machine system and change votes. Yet, here, under oath, before Congress, we have Dominion heads lying about it. Let’s get rid of them. Use paper...

Daniel Greenfield August 15, 2022 In June, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s office (SIGAR), dispatched letters to Secretary of State Blinken and Samantha Power complaining that the State Department and USAID were stonewalling its investigation of waste, corruption and terror cash. "Two SIGAR audits are also being hindered by a lack of cooperation from State and USAID. The first evaluates your agencies’ compliance with the laws and regulations prohibiting transfers of funds to members of the Taliban and the Haqqani Network," the letter to Power complained. The Haqqani Network, which is allied with Al Qaeda, gained control of...