Well, I guess since it's an election year, Obama must continue to reward criminals in ever way he possible can. First he used an executive order to stop the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants. Now we learn that under Obama, the IRS is allowing "non-US citizens" to commit tax fraud and actually dismantled a group designed to stop this particular type of fraud.
We know, Obama loves his taxcheats.
The IRS showed more interest in processing applications for a taxpayer identification number than in vetting those requests for fraud, according to a federal audit publicly released Wednesday.
The revenue service's review of applications for Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) was lacking and there was no reason to believe the IRS uncovered as much fraud as it could, the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration found.
Russell George, the tax administration inspector general, said that those findings were "troubling." ITINs are given to non-U.S. citizens, who are ineligible for a Social Security Number, for tax purposes, and can even be used by people not eligible to be in the United States.
The inspector general "found an environment which discourages employees from detecting fraudulent applications," George said in a statement.
The IRS has said that it has already started to beef up its oversight of ITIN applications and will continue to make improvements.
But GOP lawmakers slammed the agency's handling of the issue, with one senior House Republican — Rep. Sam Johnson (Texas) — calling for the resignation of the IRS commissioner, Doug Shulman.
In all, the IRS processed some 2.9 million returns with ITINs in 2011, to the tune of roughly $6.8 billion in refunds. The inspector general report does not say what percentage of those returns or refunds were fraudulent, and IG officials have said that figure would be difficult to figure out.
The report found the IRS had scrapped a program that looked to sniff out potential ITIN fraud and did not spend enough time training employees on how to look for signs of fraud.
...The inspector general's report found, among other things, that single addresses in both Phoenix and Dallas were used for more than 15,000 ITIN applications, and that more than 150 mailing addresses in all were used more than 1,000 times.
One address in Atlanta was used for almost 24,000 ITIN tax refunds in 2011, for a total amount of $46.4 million.
The report also found that agency officials split up a team that was focused on finding possible fraud schemes among ITIN applications after it helped identify more than $43 million in erroneous refunds.
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