Thursday, February 08, 2007

80 - Right-Wing Heaven: Bush IRS Twists Rules To Let Corporations Get Away With Tax Evasion

Today we're going to discuss yet another way the Bush administration is continuing to push its radical right agenda even without control of Congress. In this case, it's the emasculate the government, cut taxes on the wealthy agenda. All accomplished through some until-now hidden workings of the Internal Revenue Service.

I'll tell you up front that this isn't a page-1-headline-type story. But it's a very useful story for understanding broadly used, standard issue right-wing tactics, and for learning how to debunk and effectively counter right-wing propaganda, regarding issues even substantively unrelated to tax collection.

Every year the IRS is supposed to audit a sampling of large corporations to determine whether they are following the law and paying all the taxes they legitimately owe.

Corporations paying all the taxes they legitimately owe? What kind of nonsense is that?

In a policy begun by the Bush administration in 2003

Top officials at the Internal Revenue Service are pushing agents to prematurely close audits of big companies with agreements to have them pay only a fraction of the additional taxes that could be collected

This is according to dozens of IRS agents.

Apparently, the IRS has adopted quite a strange approach to conduct investigations:

Auditors said they were told to limit questioning only to those specific issues that the I.R.S. and the companies had agreed in advance to examine. When other questionable deductions emerged in the course of the audit… additional taxes were ignored.

Oh, I get it, the subject of the investigation has to agree to be investigated about something, before the IRS will investigate that issue.

It gets much worse. Listen to the podcast to find out how.

(PS: Right-wingers, if you want to write in to me, fine, but at least do me the courtesy of listening to the podcast first. Please don't respond just on the basis of the brief written summary above. Thanks!)

Jack Clark 4:50 PM [+]
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