IRS told employees to ignore potential fraud in program used by immigrants

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.

The Treasury inspector general for tax administration said the IRS even eliminated some methods employees had used to figure out questionable refund requests, and that the agency doesn’t have the ability to verify applicants’ identity or foreign status.

Investigators “found an environment which discourages employees from detecting fraudulent applications,” said J. Russell George, the inspector general.

The IRS pays out $6.8 billion in refunds to taxpayers who file using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs), who are generally immigrants, here both legally and illegally. The amount of fraud was not stated.

The agency said it has put new checks in place to try to crack down on fraud, with employees getting training from the Homeland Security Department on how to verify documents when an immigrant applies for an ITIN.

Via: The Washington Times

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E-MAILS SHOW GEITHNER, TREASURY TERMINATED PENSIONS OF NON-UNION WORKERS

In what may contradict testimony by Obama administration officials under oath and may be a violation of federal law, The Daily Caller obtained emails that show Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department “was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company,” and the move, according to The Daily Caller, “appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.”

As The Daily Caller notes, “Under 29 U.S.C. §1342, the PBGC is the only government entity that is legally empowered to initiate termination of a pension or make any official movements toward doing so” and “the White House and Treasury Department have consistently maintained” the PBGC “independently made the decision to terminate the 20,000 non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan.”

These emails contradict sworn testimony by several Obama administration figures and is yet another example of Obama’s administration misleading lawmakers, the courts, and the public -- as they did with Obamacare -- when it came to these pension cuts. 

Via: Breitbart

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