IRS Quietly Abolishes Mandatory Expiration Dates For Illegal Immigrants’ Taxpayer Status
Photo Credit: AP
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) quietly changed regulations to allow more undocumented immigrants to keep their taxpayer status through a program that is rife with fraud and abuse, and to delay deactivation of immigrant taxpayer status until 2016.
The IRS now prevents peoples’ Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) from automatically expiring after five years as previously mandated. Now immigrants can keep their ITIN so long as they pay taxes at least once in a five-year period.
The ITIN program is primarily used by undocumented workers to follow the law and file income taxes in the United States. Reports came out during the IRS scandal linking ITIN fraud to billions in lost taxpayer dollars. The IRS was forced to reform the ITIN program at the start of 2013 – but this new regulation undoes that reform.
“The IRS will not deactivate an ITIN that has been used on at least one tax return in the past five years,” the IRS said in an explainer of the new policy. “To give all interested parties time to adjust and allow the IRS to reprogram its systems, the IRS will not begin deactivating ITINs until 2016…The new, more uniform policy applies to any ITIN, regardless of when it was issued.”
Read more from this story HERE.
_________________________________________________________________________
Border Agent: ‘Morale Is at an All-Time Low Right Now’
By Andrew Johnson.
Teenage criminals and gang members from Central America have been using “a loophole” to stay in the country, border agent Chris Cabrera revealed. Under current policy, unaccompanied minors are allowed to stay in the country if they have family in the United States and say they have none in their home country, regardless of their background.
“Even if he is a confirmed gang member, a confirmed criminal, even by self-admission, we for some reason don’t send them back to their home country — we release them into our country,” Cabrera said.
Read more from this story HERE.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Photo Credit: Fox News Latino
By EFE / Fox News.
The U.S. Border Patrol has found the bodies of 97 undocumented immigrants in the Arizona desert over the past 10 months, the latest being that of a 19-year-old youth.
“We got a call from a man asking for help. He told us he was crossing the mountains with his son who was hit by lightning. When the agents arrived he was already dead,” Andres Adame, spokesman for the Border Patrol in Tucson told Efe.
Despite the decline in the number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border and the number of arrests in Arizona, people are still dying in the desert, since, Adame said, besides supporting the high summer temperatures they also have to weather the storms, which can strike at any time and very quickly move on.
Read more from this story HERE.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Fournier: Executive Action on Immigration Would Be ‘a Nuclear Bomb’
By Andrew Johnson.
If President Obama grants legal status to millions of immigrants in the country illegally through executive action, he will drastically divide the nation and totally discount his presidential pledge, National Journal’s Ron Fournier said. Fournier, who believes the immigrants should get legal status, argued executive orders would be the worst way to do it.
Read more from this story HERE.
