I agree the the audits they are subject to are review of math calculations. I’ve had ‘corrections’ made to my returns and it doesn’t mean a full audit, just correcting math. One year I put the wrong SSN for one of my kids (back in the olden days of hand returns) and every single credit having to do with her was ‘corrected,’ so the child credit, day care credits, etc.
Also, a lot of the fraudulent returns filed take all these credits and they SHOULD be audited. A few years go one of the fraud organizations out of Florida was getting SSN from dental offices. Many of the stolen files also had kids listed, so the fraudsters were taking the parents’ SSN, plus the kids, and making up a salary and then taking all the credits.
Lawyers and accountants? Oh good god. Give me a break. It only takes 2 lab researchers or Amazombies with nothing more than 2 W2s to get above $200k MFJ. Does that even require buying a copy of TurboTax? No. A piece of paper will do. Why would anyone want to waste our taxpayer $$ to audit that return?
This has been going on for a long time. Twenty years ago in law school, our tax clinic represented many of these cases. What happens is perhaps an immigrant family takes in a boarder who makes more and all of a sudden mom is not allowed head of household status. Any person making more money than the head of household who has the same mailing address, even if just using it for mail pickup, will trigger an audit. Or the ex husband who wasn’t supposed to claim the kids now has.
One thing I found, unfortunately, among immigrants was a fear that if they asserted their rights in opposing unfair tax assessments, that it would be held against family members (children, etc) still behind in the country of origin. (As if the IRS was that organized.)
yeah, that’s the trouble with a program that has a lot of waste, fraud and abuse. Just a little googling comes up with estimates of anywhere from 30-50% of EITC payments are mistakes/errors at best (claiming too many children is in this category?) to just outright fraud.
It’s really unfortunate that the folks who need the cash refund are delayed as a result of bad actors.
Years ago I was reviewing a loan application from a very wealthy farm owner. It was very clear that he moved income between tax years, so one year he’d have $250k in income and few deduction, and the next year he’d have low income and get all kinds of credits for his 7 minor children, including the EITC.
Some of that was eliminated with the AMT, with no longer allowing income averaging, etc., but it was allowed and he did it. And the bank could see what his real annual income was, so he got the loan too.
Bunching income/expenses into alternate years is a perfectly legal and acceptable tax minimization strategy. Bunching expenses has long been recommended on cc for those who used deductions on Schedule A.
Oh, there was no question that what he was doing was allowed, just that here was a rich guy qualifying for the EITC every other year. You don’t have to be dirt poor to qualify. In fact, you have to have some income to qualify.
Posters are saying they are sick of people getting the EITC. Just giving an example of how some get it and aren’t dirt poor.
This is the first search result that pops up for IRS EITC Fraud, and is from the IRS.gov web page.
So OP, what would you propose the IRS do about a program that pays out between 1/5 and 1/4 of the claims in error? Ignore it?? Pay out more, because poor people?
If the IRS has limited resources for enforcement, should it use them on cases where the maximum recovery from correction is $6,431, or on cases where the potential recovery from correction may be orders of magnitude greater?
^^depends on the amount of resources required to recover $6431. If one just has to submit copies of birth certificates and other dependent information vs. auditing say, drug lords’ transactions via bitcoin or a nonprofit like Singer’s, the former is a whole lot easier and less resource intensive.