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Audit: IRS Loses Billions Due to Stolen ID Numbers

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Photo Credit: APTax cheats armed with stolen identification numbers are costing the Treasury billions of dollars a year, according to a new audit.

Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration says that, in 2011 alone, tax cheats were able to steal or falsely obtain some 285,000 employee identification numbers, which the IRS uses to identify a taxpayer’s business account.

In all, the IRS could be issuing around $2.3 billion a year in these sorts of false payments — or around $11.4 billion over a five-year span.

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Inspector General: Dept. of Justice Is Misreporting Terror Statistics

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

A follow-up to a 2007 audit released Monday by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that DOJ did not accurately report terrorism-related statistics in 24 of the 26 categories auditors reviewed.

“For purposes of this audit, we considered the misreporting of a statistic as significant if the statistic was either overstated or understated by 10 percent or more,” the report stated.

The follow-up audit casts new doubt on the “number of terrorism-related cases filed, the number of defendants convicted at trial or by guilty plea, and the number of defendants sentenced to prison” previously reported by DOJ.

“These inaccuracies are important because Department management and Congress need accurate terrorism-related statistics to make informed budgetary and operational decisions,” the audit states.

Major inaccuracies in “terrorism-related statistics” were reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA), and the DOJ’s Criminal Division.

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The ‘Strange’ IRS Audit of a Romney Fundraiser and Her Extended Family

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

The Internal Revenue Service’s political targeting might not have been limited to a few “rogue Cincinnati agents” or even organizations seeking nonprofit status. A major Mitt Romney fundraiser and campaign official — along with her husband and three other family members — all a visit from the taxman in 2012.

In an interview with The Daily Caller, Kit Moncrief, a big-money fundraiser and state chair in Texas for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, recounted an unusual telephone call she received from an IRS agent on her personal cell phone in the spring of last year.

“The first place [the agent] called me was on my cell phone,” Moncrief said, explaining that she believed the only place the agent could have accessed the number was from a Romney list. “The number is listed under my husband’s name. She wouldn’t have been able to be able to have my cell phone number because on the IRS form it shows the office number.

“She would have had to have gotten it from the Romney list. That’s the only way I can figure out how she got the number,” Moncrief said.

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Sequester Madness: Obama Admin. Reportedly Spending Millions to Set Up Labor Unions in Foreign Countries

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Photo Credit: Reuters Senate Republicans say the Labor Department appears to be spending millions in taxpayer dollars to establish labor unions and promote collective bargaining in foreign countries and are asking top Obama administration officials for a full audit.

The request was sent by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the leading Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“At a time when our federal budget is deteriorating rapidly … it is troubling to us that the department appears to be spending millions of dollars of taxpayer funds to establish labor unions and promote collective bargaining in foreign countries,” they said in a letter to acting Labor Secretary Seth Harris.

The purported activities were conducted by the agency’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs.

The bureau for the past several years has purportedly made numerous awards — worth millions of dollars — to the United Nations, the Solidarity Center and other similar groups, “whose stated objective is to help establish labor unions in foreign countries,” the senators said.

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IRS Audits of Small Businesses Soar Under Obama

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President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney continue to tussle over tax rates and deductions. Ignored, however, have been questions about tax collection and enforcement—tools presidents use to achieve their economic policy goals. Hit a wall ramming your tax hike or cut through Congress, simply increase or decrease tax enforcement and audits.

Under the Obama Administration, the Internal Revenue Service has placed small and medium-size businesses—the engines of job creation—in its auditing crosshairs.

According to IRS statistics, from 2009 to 2011, the coverage rate (number of audits as a percentage of total returns filed) for corporations with assets between $10 million and $50 million has increased 32 percent. The coverage rate for corporations with assets between $50 million and $100 million has increased at the same rate. Some businesspeople file individual returns, and those with incomes higher than $1 million have experience a 94 percent increase in their coverage rate, and a 29 percent increase in the actual number of exams since 2009. Those with incomes $200,000 and higher have seen a 36 percent increase in their coverage rate.

So, has ratcheting up audits on small and medium-size businesses produced more revenue bang for the IRS’s buck? Hardly.

Using 2011 IRS data, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University found that audits of a company with assets between $10 and $50 million yielded $702 in recommended additional taxes per hour. For large corporations with assets of $250 million or more, the recommended additional taxes are $9,173 per hour. Yet while the coverage rates of companies with assets between $10 to $50 million are up 32 percent, rates for companies with assets of $250 million or higher are up just 7.4 percent.

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Romney backs Ron Paul’s “Audit the Fed” & Bush’s “read my lips” pledge

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Photo Credit: davelawrence8 Creative Commons

Borrowing a key element of the anti-government libertarianism that fueled rival Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, Mitt Romney said Monday that he thinks the Federal Reserve should face an audit:  “Very plain and simple, the answer is yes. The Federal Reserve should be accountable. We should see what they’re doing,” Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said at a town hall in New Hampshire.

Mr. Romney also pushed back against President Obama’s claims that the former Massachusetts governor would raise taxes on the middle class if elected.

“Let me tell you the heart of my tax proposal: I will not raise taxes on the American people, I will not raise taxes on middle-income Americans,” Mr. Romney told supporters at St. Anselm College, where he and running mate Rep. Paul Ryan made a grand entrance to the theme song from the movie “Rudy.”

The visit marked the first joint appearance for Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan in New Hampshire — a state that could prove pivotal come Election Day.

The event gave Mr. Romney a chance to fire back at Mr. Obama, who two days earlier in nearby Windham told voters that Mr. Romney’s tax plan would mean that the wealthy get a tax cut and middle-class families will pay more.

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US wasted more than $200 million on Iraqi police training that Baghdad didn’t want or need

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Photo credit: DVIDSHUB

U.S. auditors have concluded that more than $200 million was wasted on a program to train Iraqi police that Baghdad says is neither needed nor wanted.

The Police Development Program– which was drawn up to be the single largest State Department program in the world — was envisioned as a five-year, multibillion-dollar push to train security forces after the U.S. military left last December. But Iraqi political leaders, anxious to keep their distance from the Americans, were unenthusiastic.

A report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, to be released Monday, found that the American Embassy in Baghdad never got a written commitment from Iraq to participate. Now, facing what the report called Baghdad’s “disinterest” in the project, the embassy is gutting what was supposed to be the centerpiece of ongoing U.S. training efforts in Iraq.

According to the report, the embassy plans to turn over the $108 million Baghdad Police College Annex to Iraqis by the end of the year and will stop training at a $98 million site at the U.S. consulate in the southern city of Basra. Additionally, the number of advisers has been cut by nearly 90 percent — from 350 to 36.

“A major lesson learned from Iraq is that host country buy-in to proposed programs is essential to the long-term success of relief and reconstruction activities. The PDP experience powerfully underscores that point,” auditors wrote in a 41-page summary of their inspection. An advance copy was provided to The Associated Press.

Read more from this story HERE.