Snark

"a historic collapse in audits."

It is this administration's pattern of looking the other way while everyday people get ripped off by their buddies, when it doesn't want to enforce a law that it would like to wish away in the first place, similar to no enforcement of employers hiring illegals. Government of, by, and for the rich, pure and simple.

How many major corporations had $250MM in assets in 1990? How many today? What percentage does each of those figures represent?

There is some logic to this: corporations fight back hard when they are audited, poor people don't. They're going after the low hanging fruit. It may not be fair, but it is practical.

Congress has been brutal to the IRS since 1994. It's hard being a law enforcement agency when your own government considers you the enemy.

The poor are always low hanging fruit. The fact that their tax returns are more easily audited by computer program is just another item in the long list of ways they are exploited.

Doc,

I always agree with what you say but I wish you would not use the term 'illegals.' It dehumanizes the alleged criminals.

Tax cuts by another name...

I would bet dollars to doughnuts that the corresponding number of people employed by the IRS to perform such auduts has been scaled back by a similar percentage.

Don't forget the rampant avoidance of the Alternative Minimum Tax..

This, of course, comes a week after the NYT revealed the Justice Department had declined to prosecute more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing in the last three years.

Now you can make the argument -- as my business-friendly conservative friends no doubt will -- that this is a good thing, that encumbering businesses with rules and investigations just makes them want to leave the U.S. and take their capital with them. Fair enough. Except for this quote from the IHT article:

Individuals have about a 10 percent chance of being audited, more than double the odds in 2000, according to the IRS.

So the Administration has been going soft on businesses while getting tougher on individuals. Because that's where the real money is, right?

I wish you would not use the term 'illegals.' It dehumanizes the alleged criminals.

This seems to be repeated a lot, but I find no evidence for it. It's a term which is used as shorthand for "illegal immigrants." A bunch of people at one point decided to tell us that it was "dehumanizing" to use that term, but I've yet to hear a valid justification for why this is so. It's a descriptor for a class of immigrants here illegally.

Good find...yes indeed, so much more trust worthy these days.

Speak softly - remember big brother is listening.

Tyro,

I'll try to answer your questions.

First using the term 'illegals" for "illegal immigrants" is misleading because it lumps illegal immigrants in with all the other criminals. It implies that illegal immigrants are really the same as rapists and murderers and anyone else who breaks the law.

Second the term "illegals" implies that the most important attribute these people have, their defining attribute, is that they are law breakers.

Third, once you reduce a person to a single attribute you start to ignore the rest of his humanity. This works in the other direction too. Start calling someone a 'hero' and you'll forget that he's a human too and when he shows a flaw you'll tear him down because heroes should have no flaws. Heroes have no flaws, illegals have no virtues.

That is what I mean when I say it dehumanizes the person. I agree that it is a descriptor for a class of immigrants here illegally. It is also the first step towards dehumanizing them. The next step would be to refer to them as scum or vermin or animals.

This is not something that "a bunch of people at one point decided to tell us that it was "dehumanizing" to use that term.

"Dehumanization" has been well-known and documented for a long time now.

Many people think it is fine to refer to someone as a cripple or a retard or a spastic because they are crippled or mentally retarded or have multiple sclerosis and the terms are factually correct. Being factually correct in the narrow sense can still ignore all the rest of the attributes a person has.

I read all the time of various auditing agencies suffering cutbacks and consequently untold millions (or billions) in waste, fraud, abuse and outright theft going undetected or uncollected. You typically read the pared entity generated several times more dollars in revenue than the cost it took to accomplish the task. If I could spend one dollar and net five for doing it I'd do it all day long. Why doesn't the govermnent do the same? There needs to be a policy if your revenues exceed your outlays by several magnitude your budget is left alone or even increased, but never cut so long as that differential exists. What's the damn deal?

Why should the government audit corporations?

It's because we want to get every tax dollar due, right?

Well, corporate money is invested capital. Didn't someone pay taxes on the original investment?

Corporate money is earned ROI and when it's given to the investors (stock holders and such) they should be taxed on that.

Where does taxing the corporation make sense? They're not people!

Audit individuals. It's easier.

Of course, what I'm talking about is a big change from our current system of taxing corporations and then letting them use loopholes to slip out -- thus costing us tons of money for little return.

As our country grows more prosperous and GDP grows it should take a smaller part of GDP to fund the government. So, we should in fact be able to lower tax rates and still fund government quite well.

So, I say, let's find a way to grow the economy faster and decrease tax rates on everyone as soon as possible.

Why doesn't the govermnent do the same?

You have to really screw things up, so you can prove your ideological point that government doesn't work.
I don't think this started under the Bush regime, but they've refined it to a fine art while distracting us by appearing comically (or tragically, take your pick) inept.

I know I'm not the first to make this observation but it bears repeating.

Is anybody really surprised by this?

After all, the Bush administration has pretty much shut down every regulatory function of the federal government that might negatively impact corporations.

What we've got now is government by the corporations and for the corporations.....

Gee, no reason to be a big meanie and audit those oppressed large corporations...after all, they're not paying much of the freight anymore. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,

...corporate revenues represented only 7.4 percent of all federal tax receipts in 2003. With the exception of 1983, this represents the lowest level on record (these data go back to 1934).

Far better return on IRS investment to nail those poor folks cheating on their EITC...they're the reason we have a deficit!

"Where does taxing the corporation make sense? They're not people!"

Umm, legally, corporations are people. It's one of the more unusual aspects of our legal system. They should be taxed and audited like everyone else. Or they should give up their rights as individuals.

Some specifics to illustrate Kevin's comparison with the earned-income credit (EIC): The 1040 instructions have the following warning in scary italic text:

If you take the EIC even though you are not eligible and it is determined that your error is due to reckless or intentional disregard of the EIC rules, you will not be CAUTION allowed to take the credit for 2 years even if you are otherwise eligible to do so. If you fraudulently take the EIC, you will not be allowed to take the credit for 10 years. See Form 8862, who must file, on page 47. You may also have to pay penalties.

Now I'm no tax expert, but I have read through the 1040 instructions in doing my own, and I think this is the only credit that has such warnings on it. Why, one wonders, does the EIC need such warnings about misuse of it when we don't need them for, say, the mortgage deduction or capital gains calculations? Don't people cheat on that stuff too? Seems to me that whoever wrote the law (Hi, Congress) figures that poor people are all cheats and scammers, and we'd better scare them straight, or, better yet, scare them out of taking the credit.

That said, I'm not much for hating on the IRS - they're doing what Congress and the executive branch tell them to do with things like this; but they make a handy scapegoat.

Corporations are not even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. However, due to the aberrant ruling by the SCOTUS in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad, issued during the Gilded Age, corporations now enjoy a more favored position than individuals in the eyes of the law. This has led to the corporate tyranny we see in modern times, where Halliburton and Blackwater and ExxonMobil and McDonnell-Douglas run roughshod over people and their rights, killing and maiming with impunity and are never held accountable. This lack of IRS oversight is just one more manifestation of this laissez faire conservative nonsense that is destroying this country.

Click here to find out what you can do to fight back against this pernicious trend.

What's stopping someone putting a corporation in prison for lawbreaking?

Is it just me, or has anyone wondered about the pup-up of these "advanced payday loans" on EVERY block and these "car title" trade companys that are NOW on almosts every single block these days?

These "loan shark" Repug enterprizes are more frequent now than neighborhood taverns used to be.

Yeah, Bush and McCain are real nice people - who don't see a problem with trade agreements.

Yeah, to be a Republican anymore means f*ucking over all the little people, all those BITTER small town Americans, you know, because they are so ignorant and thus, so easy to take advantage of, (it's a Repug right of passages,) all while openly practicing completely self-serving agenda. It's so easy to publish a book by the title: Republican is in a nutshell: use the less unfortunate, campaign to the ignore, cause God knows, those stupid rednecks believe anything, right out of their own jobs. A Repugs got to luv stupid people like that.

So today, when Bush says this about Colombia Trade agreement:

"This free trade agreement is in our national interests," Bush said. "Yet that bill is dead unless the speaker schedules a definite vote. This was an unprecedented move. It's not in our country's interests that we stiff an ally like Colombia and that we don't encourage our goods and services to be sold overseas."

"our goods and services to be sold overseas"??? - Hey, isn't that a bit "bass-akwards." These trade agreements are not about BUYING US services at all. THAT'S the big lie about trade agreements. It's about shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas while paying exactly the same as if we produced the product right here in the US, but hoping the displace US working can still afford the same price. The only entity to benefit is the coporate world, because it certainly is NOT the layed-off American workers.

If Bush couldn't lie, what the F*ck else would he do?

All I would suggest is that this Bush face (Cheney) administration tell McCain to go out and stump for this Bill, (you remember, in the exact same loyal way Colin Powell stumped for the invasion of Iraq, BEFORE lossing his job.) It's a real campaign winner.

I've always found offensive the threatening statements and icons, repeated ad nauseam, in the 1040 instructions under the EITC line, telling people they risk being wiped off the face of the earth if they make a mistake calculating their EITC.

It's sheer intimidation, designed to discourage those who qualify from claiming the refund.

I fill out my own Schedule C for my self-employment income, together with other crap like depreciation forms, so even though I don't make much money, I'm familiar with forms and instructions that richer folk are exposed to; and I have NEVER seen any such warnings against committing the kind of tax frauds routinely committed by more upscale taxpayers.

A few years ago we heard that self-employed people making LESS than $25,000 were the most likely to be audited. It's all of a piece, and it's disgraceful.

But of course it's only po' folk who cheat on their taxes.

This year, because it was there... I used an online service to calculate my household itemization. Normally, I do this by hand and find that we either widely or narrowly miss the mark. This year, because we finally get to take medical expenses (primary earner sprained a leg this year) we went over the standard by a bit.

Then, because the state required Domestic Partners to file jointly, I followed through and used the online version of that.

Because of the methods... I learned something I hadn't ever noticed.

We get charged over five thousand dollars more in federal taxes than a married couple. No, that's not just our deduction difference... That's the tax burden difference.

...We also each didn't qualify for the Rebate this year, even though if we were married, we'd qualify.

Please thank us for footing your government.

On the subject of IRS audits, note that David Cay Johnson has pointed out Bush cheated big-time on his taxes back when he was Governor and sold his interest in that baseball team. His share of the ownership had been enlarged by the other owners for services rendered. He reported this earned income as capital gains, knowing he was unlikely to get an audit. Saved millions in taxes.

Markh,

Where does taxing the corporation make sense? They're not people!

I really like this argument. It is incredibly amusing. On the one hand corporations are not people so they should not be taxed. On the other hand corporations do have the same rights as people - free speech being one of them.

Before the revolutionary war I believe this was called "salutary neglect." (As an aside I got this from my Daughter's 5TH GRADE history textbook. Apparently Markh knows less about history than a grade schooler.)

Markh's proposed "salutary neglect" for corporations means all the rights and protections of a citizen and none of the costs! I will admit this is consistent with standard libertarian thinking. "Salutary neglect" is what they propose for all citizens - all the existing benefits with none of the cost.

Talk about your fantasies - this is right up there with "money for nothin and chicks for free."