What are you going to do, put them in jail?
Byron York has a sort-of funny piece in the Examiner:
prisoners filed 44,944 false tax returns, attempting to claim $295.1 million in refunds. The report says IRS officials caught the fraud in many cases and stopped $256 million of that from being refunded — but the IRS did mistakenly pay $39.1 million in refunds to prisoners filing fraudulent returns. The report also notes that there is some evidence that fraud is even more widespread
So Congress passed a law (of course), set to expire this year. The IRS hasn’t done many of the things required to enforce the law, as is made clear in a mind-numbing 34 page Treasury report. How would you solve the problem?
January 8th, 2011 at 6:07 pm
Eliminate the IRS by eliminating the all direct federal taxation of individuals or entities or estates and replace with a census based prorata tax payable by the several states. Thus, Oregon with one percent of the population would be required to remit one percent of the annual expenditures (minus borrowing, I know, I know).
With the states now in the fiscal picture they need to have the checks and balances between the federal government and the states recalibrated so I would amend the Constitution to return Senators to state appointment but to only one term.
Mark Sherman
January 9th, 2011 at 11:10 pm
Wow. I like maddog’s idea. The states would have a vested interest in rolling back the size of the federal government.
January 10th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
I don’t know what you think of the FairTax measure. But it does have a feature that would remedy this problem: It eliminates the IRS and taxes only purchases.