6 February 2010
By Jane Stillwater
This week, our local
hometown news paper's headlines read, "Berkeley Daily
Planet Hit by Massive Payroll Fraud". Our poor sweet
Planet is already suffering from all the usual
financial troubles that currently plague
America's newsprint
industry, plus it has also endured many threats to its
advertisers from Israeli neo-con supporters because of
the paper's free-speech position regarding
Israel-Palestine. And now there's this latest
financial assault on it.
Apparently, the BDP's
payroll management contractor, Clickbooks, has
absconded with its income tax withholding
deposits (and about 100 other local small businesses'
deposits as well), and then its owners skipped off to
parts unknown. "A round of inquiries to the tax
agencies produced the bad news: Clickbooks had been
cashing our checks, all right, but they had been
significantly underpaying the taxes and pocketing the
difference. We are now engaged in the painful process
of trying to figure out how much we still owe the
various government tax collectors."
But while that unwelcome
news sucks eggs bigtime for the Planet, there was also
something mentioned in this article that gave me
several interesting insights into the IRS. According
to the BDP editor Becky O'Malley, "It seems that in
all the cases I investigated, the IRS had simply not
noticed, for periods of up to two years, that the
payment amounts they’d gotten from Clickbooks didn’t
match the reports of what was supposed to have been
sent...."
But WHY did the IRS drop
the ball? According to O'Malley, "It turns out that
during the Bush years the number of IRS agents took a
dramatic dive, and now there don’t seem to be enough
of them in the agency to collect all the money
owed.... [T]he difference between what is owed in
taxes and what is paid, amounted to over $300 billion
annually.... For comparison purposes, that much money
would pay for two more wars as large as our two
current ruinously expensive ones, plus covering all of
the cost of the president’s currently unfunded health
care plan. Dramatic evidence about why this gap
exists is the decrease between 1995 and 2006 in the
total number of IRS employees, down 18 percent, and in
the number of IRS employees who perform audits, down
by 30 and 40 percent in crucial categories."
Good grief! It looks like
no one is minding the store at the IRS!
With April 15 already
coming down on us so fast, this news is really HOT.
Why? Because it indicates that the chances of
American taxpayers actually getting away with one of
this country's most popular gambling passions --
seeing how much one can shave off one's taxes and
still not get caught -- is now a lot less of an
extreme sport than it used to be. The odds are
apparently no longer stacked in favor of the house.
Your chances of being audited by the IRS have just
been reduced by 30 to 40 percent!
Has the IRS just given
America an unofficial tax break? If you are a gambler
and like the new odds in your favor, it certainly
looks that way.
But, according to the
Planet article, all this firing of IRS agents took
place while GWB was in the White House or else when
Bill Clinton was president -- so you can't blame this
particular tax break on Obama.
PS: Speaking of federal
agencies not minding the store, according to some
recent U.S. House of Representatives Committee on
Homeland Security hearings, the "Underwear Bomber" was
deliberately allowed onto Flight 253 on Christmas Day
so that he might lead the feds to bigger fish. So.
Apparently the Underwear Bomber was being
deliberately allowed to blow up a plane so that
various unnamed higher-ups in DC could have an excuse
to invade Yemen? Hmmm.
Here's a link to a
videotape of the hearing, courtesy of Mike Malloy:
http://homeland.house.gov/Hearings/index.asp?ID=234.
Listen to it yourself. About 30 minutes into the
tape, Patrick F. Kennedy from the U.S. State
Department testifies that, "We came across this
person's name and were going to revoke his visa and
someone came to us -- I can tell you in private who it
was -- and said, 'Please do not revoke this visa. In
order to break a potential larger plot, it is of
higher value for us to follow [this dude]'." And to be
able to watch and see who reacts when Flight 253 is
blown up?
PPS: Someone I know just
e-mailed me that I was losing my "credibility" by
referring to the "Bush-Obama Administration". And he
is right. What I should have actually referred to
was, "The Johnson-Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama
Administration". My bad.
However. If we ever
finally get an administration in Washington that
actually protects the working class people who elected
it -- and if this fantasy administration actually
stands up and declares that a corporation is NOT a
person like you and me after all, I will seriously
reconsider my position on this matter. But don't hold
your breath waiting for that to happen any time soon.
PPPS: Here's a video of me
trying to explain about the IRS and the Underwear
Bomber while trying to multi-task -- and not doing a
very good job of any of it. But you get to see what my
messy apartment looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmpCu4wX2jo
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