Taypayer Handouts and Ripoffs

Taypayer Handouts and Ripoffs

41 Obama White House Aides Owe the IRS $831,000 in Back Taxes — and They're Not Alone

September 10, 2010

LA Times - Over the years a lot of suspicion has built up across the country about Washington and its population of opportunistic transients coming to see themselves as a special kind of person, somehow above average working Americans who don't labor down in that monument-strewn former swamp.

Well, finally, an end to all those undocumented doubts. Thanks to some diligent digging by the Washington Post, those suspicions can at last be put to rest.

They're correct. Accurate. Dead-on. Laser-guided. On target. Bingo-bango. As clear as it's always seemed to those Americans who don't feel special entitlements and do meet their government obligations.

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class ... Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along -- unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.

The Post's T.W. Farnum did some research and found that out of the total sum, just 638 workers on Capitol Hill owe the IRS $9.3 million in back taxes. As in, overdue. The IRS gets stiffed by the legislative body that controls its budget. How Washington works.

Now, back taxes have been a problem for the Obama-Biden administration. You may recall early on that Tom Daschle was the president's top pick to run the Health and Human Services Department. But it turned out the former Democratic senator, who was un-elected from South Dakota in 2004, owed something like $120,000 to the IRS for things from his subsequent benefactor that he just forgot to pay taxes on. You know how that is. $120G's here or there. So he dropped out.

And then we learned this guy Timothy Geithner owed something like $42,000 in back taxes and penalties to the IRS, which is one of the agencies that he'd be in charge of as secretary of the Treasury. The fine fellow who's supposed to know about handling everyone else's money. In the end this was excused by Washington's bipartisan CYA culture as one of those inadvertent accidental oversights that somehow never seem to happen on the side of paying too much taxes.

And under Geithner's expert guidance the U.S. economy has been, well, wow! Just look at it.

Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents' names. But we do know that as of the end of 2009, 41 people inside Obama's very own White House owe the government they're allegedly running a total of $831,055 in back taxes. That would cover a lot of special chocolate desserts in the White House Mess.

• In the House of Representatives, 421 people owe a total $6,524,892.
• In the Senate, 217 owe $2,774,836.
• In the IRS' parent department, Treasury, 1,204 owe $7,670,814.
• At the Labor Department, where Secretary Hilda Solis' husband had some back-tax problems before her confirmation, 463 owe $7,481,463.
• Eighty-one workers for the Federal Reserve System's board of governors owe $1,076,733.
• Over at the Justice Department, which is so busy enforcing other laws and suing Arizona, 1,971 employees still owe $14,350,152 in overdue taxes.

Then, we come to the Department of Homeland Security, which is run by Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona who preferred to call terrorist acts "man-caused disasters." Homeland Security is keeping all of us safe by ensuring that a Dutch tourist is aboard every inbound international flight to thwart any would-be bomber with explosives in his underpants.

Within that department, there reside 4,856 people who owe the tax agency a whopping total of $37,012,174.

And they're checking our pockets for metal and coins?

Federal Workers Owe $3 Billion in Back Taxes?

June 15, 2010

ocregister.com - Employees of the federal government apparently are a little behind in paying their taxes — like $3 billion worth, according to Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

Coburn listed collection of these unpaid taxes among 20 measures in his proposed amendment to the so-called tax extenders bill (HR 4213). A 2008 IRS report showed that 276,300 federal employees owed $3.042 billion as of September of that year.

The senator believes the projected $126 million in savings could cover the cost of the legislation without having to increase taxes.

The tax extenders bill is being watched closely by those who are out of work because it also would provide extended unemployment benefits through the end of November for people more recently laid off.

A previous bill that allowed the unemployed to move into the next of four tiers of jobless benefits or FedEd aid expired June 2. California officials estimate thousands of people in this state alone have been cut off from unemployment benefits since the legislation lapsed.

The tax extenders bill is a grab bag of legislation that would, among other things, continue a series of tax breaks for small business to create jobs and keep jobless payments going for the unemployed.

Last month the House approved a stripped-down version of the original bill after deleting a continued subsidy for COBRA health insurance premiums for the unemployed and cutting back Medicaid to states.

It immediately ran into problems in the Senate. While some are pushing to add back benefits that were cut, others are objecting to tax increases for wealthy fund managers. And how to cover the cost of whatever is agreed on continues to be the subject of debate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., submitted a motion Monday to end debate on the bill, according to The Hill. A vote on the bill itself could occur later this week.

Here are some of the ways Coburn wants to save money on the bill without tax increases:

• A one-time reduction in the budgets of members of Congress: $100 million
• Enacting the White House's one-time proposed 5% cut on government spending: $22 billion
• Eliminating over 10 years non-essential government travel: $10 billion
• One-year freeze on federal employees' salaries: $2.6 billion
• Rescinding unspent federal funds: $50 billion

Tax Scam Uncle Sam? You Oughta Be Fired! Says Utah Rep. Chaffetz

March 18, 2010

ABC News - Working for Uncle Sam comes with some great perks, like job stability, posh benefits packages, and in many cases, average salaries that are higher than what the same job pays in the private sector.

That's why Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, is irked that nearly 100,000 civilian federal employees owe the IRS $962 million in back taxes. He thinks they should pay up or be fired.

Chaffetz has introduced a bill that calls for the federal government to "ferret out" civilian employees who have "seriously delinquent tax debt" and prevent the hiring of other tax delinquents.

More than 3 percent of the 2.8 million federal civilian employees owed the Treasury unpaid federal income taxes in 2008, according to the IRS. If you include retirees and military service members, the numbers go from nearly 100,000 up to 276,000 current or former workers who owe $3 billion in taxes.

"If you get to the point where the government is putting a lien on their property and they've exhausted their appeals… the right thing to do is fire them as a federal worker," said Chaffetz. "If you're going to take federal tax dollars, you should be paying your federal taxes."

Currently, only IRS employees can be terminated for non-payment of federal income taxes -- a measure Chaffetz wants extended to all federal agencies. The IRS has the lowest level of tax delinquency among its employees than at any other federal agencies, according to the most recent statistics.

But skeptics of Chaffetz's plan argue firing the delinquents en masse circumvents due process and could only hamper efforts to recoup the cash.

Firing federal employees as soon as a lien is imposed by the IRS would be "prior to any due process hearing," said Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on the federal workforce.

"We have a system that's in place. For a federal employee, we have the [IRS] garnish their pay at 15 percent -- which is higher than for the regular taxpayer," he said. "We're getting the money back."

Wade Morrow, assistant general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employees union, said workers should be held to account for back taxes but that Chaffetz's rule would not accommodate the complexities of individual cases.

"There may be other facts and circumstances that you should consider," he said, adding that some individuals may have become delinquent due to sickness or divorce complications or due to a mistake in tax filings.

Morrow also said the most serious offenders could face termination under existing guidelines if the tax delinquencies interfere with their jobs.

"Getting them to pay back what they owe is preferable to having them all fired, in which case you're not going to get anything at all," said Morrow.

Chaffetz: Firing Federal Employee Tax Delinquents Aligns With Obama in Principle

Chaffetz conceded the terminations would probably make it harder for the individuals to pay their tax bills and said employees appealing to the IRS or "making a good faith effort" to repay them should be spared.

But he said a broad purge of tax delinquents is still justified and consistent with a principle laid out by President Obama for contractors employed by the federal government.

Earlier this year, Obama ordered federal agencies to terminate contracts with companies who don't pay federal taxes.

"It's simply wrong for companies to take taxpayer dollars and not be taxpayers themselves," the president said Jan. 20. "We need to insist on the same sense of responsibility in Washington that so many of you strive to uphold in your own lives, in your own families and in your own businesses."

Democrats in both the House and the Senate have introduced legislation codifying new rules for federal contractors who don't pay their taxes. Chaffetz is the first and only Republican so far to co-sponsor the House version.

"I think the president's right in the case [of companies] and now I'd like it expanded to federal workers as well," he said. "If you're going to take federal tax dollars, you should be paying your federal taxes."

The bill is currently under consideration by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.