Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

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IRS Is Struggling to Assess and Collect ObamaCare Taxes Print
By Ashton Ellis
Wednesday, August 27 2014
It’s impossible to play by the rules when you don’t know the rulebook.

As ObamaCare’s taxes go into effect, the Internal Revenue Service’s role in enforcing the controversial health care law is getting more attention.

The reviews so far aren’t encouraging.

In mid-August, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) published a report critical of the IRS’s failure to accurately assess and collect ObamaCare’s medical device tax.

The most glaring problem for the agency is its failure to give proper guidance to businesses now required to pay an excise tax of up to 2.3 percent of the sales price for every medical device sold.

For context, ObamaCare’s medical device tax is estimated to raise $20 billion between 2013 and 2019.

The tax is collected by the business, and must be paid quarterly on something called a Form 720.

Since the medical device tax is new, the IRS decided to waive “failure to deposit” penalties for the first three quarters of 2013 – the year the tax became operative – if the business showed a good faith effort to comply.

However, no one apparently told the IRS staff members actually responsible for collecting the device tax revenue, because the agency “erroneously assessed 219 FTD penalties… totaling $706,753 against businesses” making good faith efforts to comply.

To its credit, the IRS reversed 133 of the 219 penalties by January 8, 2014. But it took TIGTA auditors drawing attention to the remaining 86 before the agency dropped those as well.

Besides failing to regulate coherently, the IRS also botched Form 720. In the 2013 version, there was no decimal point separating dollars from cents. Thirty-eight percent of the forms reviewed by TIGTA “contained a sales price amount with a decimal that was likely excluded, misplaced, or missed during the processing of these tax returns.”

The following example is typical.

Taxpayer A enters taxable sales as $1234567 without a comma or decimal point. During tax return processing, an IRS tax examiner enters this amount as $12,345.67; however, the actual taxable amount was $1,234,567.

Because of this and other practices traceable to the IRS, TIGTA “identified medical device excise tax discrepancies totaling almost $117.8 million…” 

The IRS is doing no better when it comes to implementing the employer mandate.

After delaying the mandate twice, the Obama administration is pushing ahead with plans to require large employers – those with 100 or more full-time employees – to offer government-defined “affordable” health insurance beginning in 2015. Failure to comply results in a $2,500 per employee penalty – now called a “tax” thanks to the Supreme Court.

But even with all the extra time to develop a reporting procedure, the IRS only recently published drafts of the forms companies must use to comply with the mandate.

Business groups are outraged.

“The IRS only released draft forms, with no instructions or technical specifications,” Christine Pollack, vice president of Government Affairs at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, said in a statement. “For the longest time, retailers have been pounding their heads, asking for this information from the IRS in order to get their systems up and running and comply with these requirements beginning this January. Yet again, it’s too little, too late for employers.”

It’s impossible to play by the rules when you don’t know the rulebook. If the TIGTA report is any indication, the IRS might try to buy itself some time by waiving penalties for non-compliance when it comes to enforcing the employer mandate. While one might justify this as an act of fairness toward firms attempting to comply with an incoherent regulation, it also highlights how easy it is to set aside the rule of law to save face politically.

From the glitch-filled rollout of Healthcare.gov to the ongoing failure to verify income statements for those claiming subsidies, ObamaCare continues to be an administrative train wreck.

And, due to its role as tax-collector-in-chief, the IRS will be at the center of the chaos.

Notable Quote   
 
"Americans do not trust several major U.S. institutions, including the national news media.The recently released Center Square Voters' Voice poll found that 43% of Americans say the media is trustworthy, compared with 54% who said it is not trustworthy.Younger people were more likely to trust the media, with 47% of those ages 18-34 saying they trust it and 46% saying the opposite.The numbers steadily…[more]
 
 
— Casey Harper, The Center Square
 
Liberty Poll   

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