Free Republic

The “Inflation Reduction Act,” which as we’ve pointed out is unlikely to tame inflation, contains $80 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service to hire a staggering 87,000 new agents to slog through the financial affairs of Americans. The allocation is a 600 percent increase over the agency’s 2021 budget of $12.6 billion.The bill cleared the Senate Sunday and now heads to the House, where it’s expected to pass. It would more than double the agency’s current staffing, bringing it up eventually to 165,000 people. That’s more than the population of Tempe, Arizona.The Washington Free Beacon reports that the...

ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.

Mexican migrants working abroad sent home a record $36 billion in remittances in 2019... It’s the highest level of remittances on record. It’s also greater than the $25 billion in income Mexico receives from foreign tourism, or the country’s $22.4 billion in annual petroleum exports. Mexico’s central bank said the average amount of each electronic transfer sent home was about $300...

Tuesday is tax day. I tell you this not to raise your blood pressure, but to remind you. If youÂ’re like me, you wait till the last minute because you have to cut a check to Uncle Sam. Since withholdings used to force me to give the government an interest-free loan before I started doing contracting work, I figured making them wait till the very last day was the least I could do to protest for the hand in my wallet they used to have for me.But I will cut that check again this year, as I do every year....

Barack Obama has called for international tax reform in the wake of the revelations contained in the Panama Papers. “There is no doubt that the problem of global tax avoidance generally is a huge problem,” he told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “The problem is that a lot of this stuff is legal, not illegal.” The US president said the leak from Panama illustrated the scale of tax avoidance involving Fortune 500 companies and running into trillions of dollars worldwide. “We shouldn’t make it legal to engage in transactions just to avoid taxes,” he added, praising instead “the...

Don’t you love donating to causes you believe in? Don’t you love that warm fuzzy feeling from knowing that contributing to a worthy cause? And don’t you especially love that you can support whatever organization you choose anonymously? That last one is especially important given the news over the last few years that the IRS has been targeting conservatives with audits and denial of tax-free status for nakedly political reasons. Well, if the IRS has their way, this may be a luxury that will soon go the way of the dinosaur. A new rule is proposing that non-profit organizations collect...

FOX CHAPEL, Pennsylvania, November 5, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Three years ago, Nino Esposito adopted his adult gay lover, Roland Bosee, Jr., as his legal son in order to save money on future inheritance taxes. Now that homosexual "marriage" is legal in Pennsylvania, they went to court to dissolve that legal adoption so as to "wed." Judge Lawrence J. O'Toole, of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County, told the men that state law didn't give him the power to dissolve a legal adoption, unless there was fraud involved.  Now Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) is asking the Obama administration to...

According to a report issued by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), the IRS allowed 960 out of 1,580 employees—or 61 percent—who willfully cheated on their taxes to continue working there after the misconduct was discovered. Most employees received less penalties such as counseling, reprimands, or suspensions. […] The report further stated that it could discern no consistent pattern to explain why certain employees had their penalties mitigated, while some were repeat offenders. …

Democrats are fond of accusing Republicans of being hypocrites on a variety of issues, but particularly when it comes to tax policy. The liberal comedian Bill Maher recently claimed that Republicans expose themselves to this critique when they champion the value of hard work and perseverance while simultaneously opposing the inheritance tax. “If the tough love of cutting off free money for the poor is the right thing to do, how can we stand by and do any less for the Conrad Hiltons of the world? They’ve never known the dignity of work either,” Maher insisted recently. “Shouldn’t we...

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,...

The IRS rehired hundreds of employees who had prior records of bad performance at the agency, including 141 former workers who had botched their own tax returns and others who had used their positions to peek at private tax information, the agency’s inspector general said in a report released Thursday. Five IRS employees were rehired even though the agency knew they had intentionally failed to file their taxes within the last two years, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George said. Of the employees with prior problems, nearly 20 percent of them had more problems after they were...

The Argentine government has used drones to catch out wealthy tax evaders who had not declared mansions and swimming pools. Unmanned aircraft were dispatched over an upper class area of Buenos Aires and discovered 200 homes and 100 pools that had not been detailed on returns. Tax officials said the drones took pictures of luxury houses standing on lots registered as empty. The evasions found by the drones amounted to missing tax payments of more than $2 million and owners of the properties have been waned they now face large fines. Use of drones has been expanding in Argentina and...

Kelly Parker was thrilled when she landed her dream job in 2012 providing tech support for Harley-Davidson's Tomahawk, Wisconsin, plants. The divorced mother of three hoped it was the beginning of a new career with the motorcycle company. The dream didn't last long. Parker claims she was laid off one year later after she trained her replacement, a newly arrived worker from India. Now she has joined a federal lawsuit alleging the global staffing firm that ran Harley-Davidson's tech support discriminated against American workers — in part by replacing them with temporary workers from South Asia. The firm, India-based Infosys...

Workers like tips. For millions of restaurant servers and bartenders, tips are cash-in-hand that can be spent that day for groceries, bills or entertainment. The money isn’t bad either... Despite these facts, union front groups known as worker centers are leading an aggressive campaign to eliminate tipping from American restaurants. One of the more prominent critics of tipping is labor activist Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC). Jayaraman has attempted to label tipping as sexist, racist and other hot-button terms meant to stir emotion and shame consumers. But the provocative terms used by Jayaraman and other activists...

Within days after each season premiere and season finale of the Discovery Channel's reality show "Moonshiners," they come — a small but perceptible wave of people — to purchase suspiciously large amounts of corn, sugar and hardy strains of fermenting yeast at Austin Homebrew Supply. "We know what they're up to," says Chris Ellison, the manager of the Texas store.That is, it's obvious they're planning to ferment the sugars from grain or fruit juice into alcohol, then distill the resulting mid-strength beverage into high-alcohol hooch.Making spirits at home with plans to drink it is against federal law. Only with the...

Starting Monday, Illinois same-sex couples facing terminal illness can marry — nearly six months ahead of the state’s new marriage equality law taking effect, a federal judge in Chicago ruled. U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman has ordered the Cook County Clerk’s office to immediately issue marriage licenses to all Illinois same-sex couples who can provide a doctor’s declaration stating that one or both of them has a life-threatening illness that would prevent them from marrying after the marriage equality law takes effect June 1. “When you have a terminal illness, every day is significant,” Camilla Taylor, Marriage Project...

<p>CEOs are on an elite list of 11 tax-exempt charity chiefs who command a staggering seven-figure salary, according to the 2013 “Charity CEO Compensation Study,” which analyzed the 2011 IRS returns of 3,929 US-based charities that rely on public support.Charity Navigator noted that the country’s highest-paid CEOs oversee multi-million dollar operations, with the largest nonprofits having expenses of more than $13.5 million. But it termed some of the salaries “excessive” and “outrageously high.”</p>

The drug trade is expanding throughout the world as reported by Holly Ellyatt for CNBC: "according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and European crime-fighting agency Europol, the annual global drugs trade is worth around $435 billion a year, with the annual cocaine trade worth $84 billion." The United States has the most junkies per capita but drug consumption in Brazil, Argentina and other emerging markets is approaching America's degenerate levels. Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder and his Justice Department have decided to release more drug dealers from U.S. prisons many of whom no...

The Internal Revenue Service has recouped more than $5.5 billion under a series of programs that offered reduced penalties and no jail time to people who voluntarily disclosed assets they were hiding overseas, government investigators said Friday. In all, more than 39,000 tax cheats have come clean under the programs. But there’s more. Government investigators suspect that thousands of other taxpayers have quietly started reporting foreign accounts without paying any penalties or interest. The number of people reporting foreign accounts to the IRS nearly doubled from 2007 to 2010, to 516,000 accounts, a report by the Government Accountability Office said....

President Obama has done a lot of talking the last year about Americans paying their fair share of taxes. Apparently he means, Do as I say, not as my staff does. A new report from the Internal Revenue Service has just revealed that 40 of Obama's White House aides owe their employer, the federal government, a total of $333,485 in back taxes. This is the third straight year that the chief executive of the United States has been unable to get his own staff members to keep up with a citizen's legal income tax obligations. to the tune of hundreds...