Two Business Owners Fight the IRS to Get Their Seized Money Back

On the last day of Ramadan, which ended Friday, Khalid (Ken) Quran was headed to work.

The owner of a convenience store in Greenville, N.C., Quran works seven days a week with little opportunity for vacation, and has been since he first arrived in the United States in 1997. The ending of the month of fasting was supposed to be a day of celebration for Quran, who worked as a fireman in a town north of Jerusalem before immigrating, but instead it’s just like any other day.

For nearly two decades, Quran has been working to provide for his wife and four children here in the United States. He’s been successful, putting all four of them through college with the money his store makes, and saving for retirement.

But on a June day last year, Quran nearly lost it all after the Internal Revenue Service seized $153,907.99 from his store’s bank account

He was never charged with a crime.

“The United States government—they stole my money,” he said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “I’m working all my life, seven days a week, and they just came in here and took it.”

When two IRS agents came into Quran’s convenience store last year, he didn’t know he’d done anything wrong. But the agents told him he had committed multiple structuring violations, which involves making cash deposits or withdrawals of under $10,000 to skirt reporting requirements.

“The United States government—they stole my money.I’m working all my life, seven days a week, and just came in here and took it,” said Khalid Quran.

When the government officials came into Quran’s store to tell him his money had been seized, they provided him with a form confirming his “consent to forfeit.” Quran, whose first language is Arabic, said he had trouble understanding the form’s legal jargon.

The officers offered to read it for him, Quran recalled, and they ordered him to sign it, yelling in his face. If he didn’t, the IRS agents said they would go to Quran’s wife, Dina, and get her signature instead–which he viewed as a veiled threat.

Via: Daily Signal

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Report: IRS Hands Out $14 Billion For Green Energy, Doesn’t Keep Track Of It

A new government watchdog report found that the Internal Revenue service has handed out billions of dollars to support green energy projects, and then failed to mention how the money was spent on building new power generation.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that IRS tax subsidies to green energy operators “accounted for an estimated $13.7 billion in forgone revenue to the federal government for renewable projects and $1.4 billion for traditional projects” between 2004 and 2013.

That’s a lot of money, but the IRS can’t (or won’t) tell government auditors how much green energy generating capacity their tax subsidies are supporting. The GAO says the IRS “is not required to collect project level data from all taxpayers” who claim an Investment Tax Credit (ITC) or Production Tax Credit (PTC).

“IRS officials stated that IRS is unlikely to collect additional data on these tax credits unless it is directed to do so,” the GAO reported. “Since 1994, GAO has encouraged greater scrutiny of tax expenditures, including data collection. Without project-level data on the ITC and PTC, Congress cannot evaluate their effectiveness as it considers whether to reauthorize or extend them.”

Via: Daily Caller

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[EDITORIAL] IRS shows we're all at the mercy of feds' incompetence

As the financial crisis wreaked havoc on America's economy in October 2008, billionaire investor Warren Buffett made a wise observation about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the two institutions at the center of the crash — and the regulatory agency that oversaw them at that time.

"It's really an incredible case study in regulation," Buffett said. "[T]he sole job of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie. ... Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has over 200 employees now. They have a budget now that's $65 million a year, and all they have to do is look at two companies."

Of course, the catastrophic failure of the two tightly-regulated, government-sponsored enterprises is now the stuff of financial legend. Buffett's point stands as a nice antidote to the myth that tight government control can prevent most anything from going wrong. And as Fannie and Freddie were government enterprises, it also shows how government not only fails to prevent catastrophe, but often creates it or makes it possible.

On Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service announced that about 100,000 taxpayers had had their personal data stolen from one of the agency's systems. As the Washington Examiner's Sarah Westwood reportedWednesday, this theft comes after years of warnings from the Treasury Department's inspector general about identity theft, which already costs the agency more than $5 billion each year, and which the agency remains incapable of preventing. No one expects the Internal Revenue Service — the supposedly wise guardian of millions of Americans' most private financial data — to be a leaky sieve for identity thieves to exploit. But it is.

Historically, fraudsters have exploited the tax-filing process by claiming the tax refunds of others. The IRS, ever quick to pounce taxpayers for innocent errors, is notoriously slow in dealing with such situations once they have been identified — according to the Government Accountability Office, it can take up to nine months in resolving them. And as the inspector general noted in 2012, the agency has no idea how many identity thieves exploit their processes to make bank.

Via: Washington Examiner

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Investigation IDs IRS Leaker - But the law he broke actually prevents NOM, the victim, from learning more.

A House committee investigating the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of right-leaning groups has identified the IRS agent who leaked the confidential donor list of the National Organization for Marriage, a conservative organization that opposes gay marriage. NOM’s donor list, contained in a Form 990 Schedule B, which it is required by law to file with the IRS, was obtained in March 2012 by its chief political opponent, the Human Rights Campaign, and subsequently became the subject of several national news stories that centered on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s donation to the group.

Though the House Ways and Means Committee, which began investigating the scandal in the wake of revelations that the IRS had inappropriately singled out conservative groups, has identified the individual who divulged the information as an employee in the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division, it can’t divulge his name to the public or to NOM. It can’t even confirm when the leak took place, whether the perpetrator was disciplined, or even whether he is still employed by the IRS or the U.S. government. That’s because of a peculiarity of the Internal Revenue Code’s section 6103, which is intended to protect the confidentiality of taxpayer information. The law makes it a felony to disclose tax returns or related information to the public, but in an odd twist, the results of investigations conducted by congressional committees or by inspectors general are considered the confidential tax information of the alleged perpetrator.

Via: NRO
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When will Jeffrey Zients return from South Africa?

Former Obama official held White House meeting with IRS officials during targeting scandal of Tea Party

Amid new revelations about the IRS targeting scandal, the Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said Tuesday that former OMB head Jeffrey Zients’ extended absence from the United States is due to a family vacation.

OMB’s statement came after The Daily Caller reported that former leader Jeffrey Zients met at the White House with key figures at the Internal Revenue Service just before news broke that the IRS was targeting conservative nonprofit groups for abusive audits and delays.

Zients has still not returned from an overseas trip that began after his departure from the Obama administration in April, two weeks before the IRS scandal broke. A White House source told The Daily Caller that Zients’ absence from the country has been noticeable and concerning.

Via: Daily Caller

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Obamacare 'Glitch' Screws Middle Class

Ambiguity in Health Law Could Make Family Coverage Too Costly for Many

The new health care law is known as theAffordable Care Act. But Democrats in Congress and advocates for low-income people say coverage may be unaffordable for millions of Americans because of a cramped reading of the law by the administration and by the Internal Revenue Service in particular.

Under rules proposed by the service, some working-class families would be unable to afford family coverage offered by their employers, and yet they would not qualify for subsidies provided by the law.

The fight revolves around how to define “affordable” under provisions of the law that are ambiguous. The definition could have huge practical consequences, affecting who gets help from the government in buying health insurance.

Under the law, most Americans will be required to have health insurance starting in 2014. Low- and middle-income people can get tax credits and other subsidies to help pay their premiums, unless they have access to affordable coverage from an employer.

Via: New York Times

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