Warren Pushes Bill Giving IRS More Personal Info and POWER to “Calculate” What you owe
Senator Warren thinks Americans want the IRS to have even more power.
Warren is obviously reliving the “good old days” when Obama used the government agency as a weapon against his enemies.
The senator wants to grant the IRS more access to your personal information and allow them to “calculate” what you owe.
Gee, no thanks!
From Investors.com
The IRS proved during the 2012 Obama reelection campaign that taxpayers could not trust them. Indeed, the IRS bent over backwards to help Obama’s reelection, even to the point of committing openly illegal acts.
[…]Senator Elizabeth Warren (Socialist, Massachusetts) proposed a bill last year, while the IRS was still stonewalling TeaPartyGate, to let the IRS calculate tax liability for taxpayers, supposedly for “free.”
Except that Warren’s legislation is not going to be free considering all the extra tax liability the IRS is going to calculate that you owe.
Because you can be sure the IRS is never going to be as aggressive as private tax lawyers or competing tax preparation services would be in ferreting out the maximum deductions and tax shelters available to taxpayers.
Taxpayers today can even get private tax preparation services to help them with their tax filings for free with online apps.
Based on hard experience, taxpayers would be foolish to give that up. Yet that is the first thing Sen. Warren’s bill proposes to do. She proposes that taxpayers could get the IRS to calculate their tax liability for them, as long as the taxpayer discloses all their tax shelters and strategies up front.
Some worry that Warren will sell this as non-controversial and try to sneak it into Trump’s tax reform effort. Transparently, this would create a conflict of interest for the IRS.
Indeed, Congress enacted a bipartisan “Tax Free File” program in 1998 requiring the IRS to implement a “return free” option for the 70% of taxpayers with relatively simple tax filings.
Yet, this option remains underdeveloped almost a decade after the legislation’s 2008 deadline. Today, only 3% of taxpayers use this “Tax Free File,’ supposedly return free choice.
The National Taxpayer Advocate Office at the IRS, which represents the interest of taxpayers, has repeatedly recommended abolishing this failed option.
But instead, the IRS has repeatedly signed binding Free File agreements with private tax preparation companies, pledging that the federal government will “not enter the tax preparation software and e-filing services marketplace.”
Because market-based solutions are better than government based solutions, private tax preparation services, fighting for survival in the competitive marketplace, are obviously going to give taxpayers a better deal than the IRS, supposedly serving taxpayers through an option that is already scored as increasing revenue overall.
Warren’s bill, however, just follows the socialist motto “if the government fails once, try try again.” After 20 years of failure, Senator Warren wants to try the same failure over again. Senator Cruz had a much better idea, “Abolish the IRS.”
Amy Moreno is a Published Author, Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can reach her on Facebook here.
