(no subject)

[novapsyche]

Feds eliminate 157 auditors of rich taxpayers: Move cuts ranks of IRS lawyers who inspect returns that include estate and gift taxes (thanks, brendand)

Sharyn Phillips, a veteran IRS estate tax lawyer in Manhattan, called the cuts a "back-door way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax."

[Kevin] Brown[, an IRS deputy commissioner,] dismissed as preposterous any suggestion that the IRS was soft on rich tax cheats. He said the money saved by eliminating the estate tax lawyers would be used to hire revenue agents to audit income tax returns, especially those from people making more than $1 million.

Brown said civil service rules barred the estate tax lawyers from moving over to audit income taxes. An IRS spokesman said the agency had asked for permission to allow such transfers twice but the Office of Personnel Management had not responded.

Estate tax lawyers are the most productive tax law enforcement personnel at the IRS, according to Brown. For each hour they work, they find an average of $2,200 of taxes owed to the government.

Comments

[kittenkissies.livejournal.com]

It never fails to amaze me they find new ways to screw the poor.
They must have people who are constantly on the lookout for new methods.
So odd that there seems to be no way to stop it.

[xterminal.livejournal.com]

So odd that there seems to be no way to stop it.

There is no way to stop it. It can, however, be vastly curtailed, and very easily.

The more laws there are, and the more specific those laws are, the more loopholes there will be in the laws. This is by definition; you can't cover every eventuality when planning ahead, and any decent lawyer, upon reading the new laws, will immediately start looking for the new loopholes, and will then start exploiting them.

The obvious solution, and the one almost everyone refuses to see: simplfy the laws as much as possible. (The drawback: the more one simplifies the laws, the more people are going to lose their jobs overnight. Think of how many people would be left jobless if, say, we switched to a flat-tax system tomorrow.)

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

I think he means there seems to be no way to stop the Bush administration from firing those lawyers. At least, that's how I read it.

[xterminal.livejournal.com]

You may well be right.

I'm not sure there's much of a way to stop the Bush administration from doing anything. That would require getting too many people up off their armchair-quarterback asses and doing something constructive...

[kittenkissies.livejournal.com]

Wow.