Where's your check? Ask GOP lawmakers.
ON WEDNESDAY, what would have been Tax Day, many Americans who would have been wondering how much they had to send the Internal Revenue Service instead wondered how much they would get in stimulus bill money from Washington. The Post’s Heather Long and Michelle Singletary reported Thursday that many did not get as much as they were promised. Some got $1,200 checks for themselves but not the $500 for each under-17 dependent they were supposed to receive. Others, including many who used tax preparation services, got nothing at all because the IRS did not have their electronic bank account information. New electronic tools to help people get their money worked for some but not others. It will likely take much longer to dispatch paper checks to those to whom the IRS cannot send money via direct deposit, even as the nation’s economic situation gets more desperate and the need for immediate aid gets ever-more acute.
The IRS must fix the glitches, fast. But blame should not be cast solely on a federal bureaucracy that Congress ordered to organize, in a matter of weeks, the massive logistical effort required to send tens of millions of people hundreds of billions of dollars, in a variety of ways, in partnership with other big agencies, when its banking records were incomplete, all the while protecting against identity theft and other forms of fraud. For example, according to Ashley Schapitl, spokesperson for the Senate Finance Committee,the IRS told lawmakers that the agency’s ability to send out paper checks was far more limited than it was in 2008, the last time it was asked to do something similar. Meanwhile, IRS staff face the same challenges everyone else does working in the age of social distancing.
Moreover, Congress itself deserves much blame for the undercapacity of the IRS. Years of GOP defunding led to severe underinvestment in staff, technology and customer service, the folly of which is only more obvious now.
In normal times, the big problem with the Republican campaign against the IRS was that it led to lax enforcement of tax laws, which let cheaters skip out on paying massive amounts of money to the Treasury. Small amounts of funding spent to maintain a functional IRS would have yielded large amounts of income that the federal government was owed, at the same time ensuring fairness for the vast majority of Americans who obeyed the law.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/wheres-your-check-ask-gop-lawmakers/2020/04/17/0e8ed750-8015-11ea-8013-1b6da0e4a2b7_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
