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Speaking of the IRS….
Well, at least someone was. The Nightly News featured about a 53-second segment on how the IRS is completely backed up on processing the 2020 tax returns. If you blinked, you would have missed it. However, it caught my attention because last week, we received a one-page letter that we had a credit that was deposited in our “account.” Wow, I said to my husband, I think we have a refund! I put it aside, then looked at it again and decided to call our accountant.
His assistant asks me: “Did you owe money in 2020? (we always do so the answer was yes). Is it the same amount you owed? I wasn’t sure, but planned to dig out the return. She said they probably threw it away, but deposited your check.
“Excuse me, but what did you just say, I asked?! Could you repeat that – did you say they threw away our tax return??”
She said yes. That is what they are hearing, and they have been getting more and more of these over the past 18 months! I pulled out the return, which was sent certified, return receipt. It was stamped “received”, and with the stamped signature of the receiver. The amount we owed that year was the same amount on the letter for a credit. She said we’ll probably have to re-send it. I thought we sent it electronically, but then send the hard copy with the W-2 attachments, etc. It was sent well before April 15th. So they took the check, which was sent with the return and deposited it, and our return went into the netherworld.
From the New York Times:
The Internal Revenue Service will kick off the approaching tax season with a backlog of at least 10 million unprocessed returns from last year, according to a new report by the national taxpayer advocate. The pile of returns remaining are from the “most challenging year taxpayers and tax professionals have ever experienced,” the advocate, Erin M. Collins, wrote in her annual report.
The I.R.S. itself warned taxpayers this week that staffing shortages and backlogs would translate into another frustrating filing season, which begins on Jan. 24 and runs through April 18 (in most states).
This is the same IRS that the Biden administration is trying to tap to start monitoring the bank accounts of US citizens?
What could possibly go wrong? Are they running an ad on Indeed.com for more agents?! Shouldn’t processing the returns be a priority, and how many are waiting for a refund? How many more issues will be blamed on COVID or a lack of workers?
Make sure you keep track of your filings and do it earlier if possible. The 53-second story on the news came and went quickly and no one else is talking about it. It seems the “curve” we were told to get over has grown into a mountain.
Published in General
Not a good enough reason as far as I’m concerned. There is, in fact, no reason the government needs voice recognition on me.
What if I’m mute by choice or circumstance? What if I’ve taken a vow of silence? (Something I really should do anyway.)
My thinking was, What if I’ve got a cough due to cold? But yeah, I’m pretty sure it goes into a vast bank accessible to any government agency.
Though ID.me is just a third-party vendor with a huge client called the United States Government. Why should we trust them with such personal information? I fully expect that all of your data will eventually end up in the hands of nefarious evildoers.
I had to use login.gov.
That’s crazy! I made a phone call and said I was ready to to receive SS and it took five minutes with none of that. With Medicare I had a really great agent who did everything for me on line – we had a phone appt. He filled out everything as we spoke. None of that stuff you mentioned. I can message you his info if you want it.
This afternoon we briefly caught a few seconds of the Kim Commando show on the car radio and she was discussing the ID.me with a phone in guest – she said she is avoiding this and not advising people to offer any personal identification like facial scanning or voice and is looking into it. She agreed it’s invasive and wait and not be among the first if possible – until bugs are worked out etc. Sheesshh!
ID.me is the bug.
If the COVID psy ops continues, I imagine wearing a mask with a face shield might be an option, right?
Welcome to Social Security or Medicare.
If your existence as is being handled by them continues to be weird, you can always ask for the worker’s supervisor. And even for adjudication by Medicare, if some huge problem arises and it remains unsolved for weeks. (There is a special term for that adjudication, which slips my grey cells at the moment.)
Furthermore, Democrats like Bill Gates, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren want a wealth tax on the very richest Americans. Which means that for those who qualify, an IRS has to calculate the total value of every asset (minus liabilities) that person owns to calculate their net worth, so the tax can be assessed. When a rich person dies and this is done to calculate the estate tax, it can take years to figure out! And some Democrats and socialists want this to be done every year for several hundred people. If the IRS cannot even get its current workload done, they would obviously need to hire more agents to also implement the wealth tax. And more to comb through the data mentioned in the quote.
I think you mean several scores of millions of people. Of course they have to start somewhere and work their way into it.
According to Elizabeth Warren, her plan would target the approximately 700 richest people in the country. Maybe Bernie Sanders wants to cast a wider net?
After their greed fails to be satisfied with what they can take from the 700 richest people, they will point out that it’s time for others to step up. Rinse and repeat. If there is a crisis, such as World War I, they won’t even have to do it gradually. And they can make a crisis out of almost anything that strikes their fancy.
And it will be easy, because in order to determine who the 700 wealthiest people are, they will have to collect data from perhaps the 70,000 wealthiest people to find out where that 700 cutoff point is.
Here is an article that goes into detail on Warren’s plan. I know that she has said it would only affect about 700 people but according to the article, “About 100,000 American families would be liable for the ultra-millionaire Tax, according to an analysis by economists from the University of California-Berkeley.”
Math is hard. Human behavior is even harder.
Logic is hard, too. That article had some good information in it, but the closing paragraph seems like it was written by a journalist:
It’s quite a leap from the observation that most Americans think the rich should “contribute” more to the conclusion that the idea of a wealth tax has broad support.
I agree with you technically, but I suspect that a lot – perhaps the majority – of people who believe the rich are undertaxed don’t really care much about which tax is used to go after them. An increase in the top income tax rate, a wealth tax, a tax on luxury goods, whatever it takes is probably the view of many. My view of the estate tax is that it should be abolished, period. But a lot of people think it is fine as long as the number at which it kicks in is far above the amount that their family has.
That’s true, but that’s still quite a leap of logic. And the more that is learned about how it would work, the more any support will fall away.
Is that why they’re planning to double the number of IRS agents?
That’s the reason, but it’s not why.
The Alternative Minimum Tax was initially targeted at fifty individuals. By the time it was eliminated in 2017, hundreds of thousands of people were paying it, and millions of people had to calculate the possibility that they might have to pay it.
Even the income tax itself was in 1913 said to be intended as a very small tax on a very small number of high income individuals.
Taxes advertised as targeting only a few almost always end up hitting many more. And often ends up being larger than originally advertised.