THE BIG GUYS & THE LITTLE GUYS

There is little that irks me as much as knowing the IRS is not going after money owed the government by some very rich taxpayers while the rank and file are trying their best to stay afloat in today’s economy.

Actually, when you get right down to it there isn’t much excuse in not going after everybody who owes money. But let’s face it, going after someone who owes $100 is not quite in the same category as going after someone who owes more than $1,000,000.

Why am I getting riled up about this now? A headline in the newspaper a few days ago reads “IRS IS SLOW TO PURSUE BIG DEBTS”

The article itself says that according to a Treasury Department audit, the IRS has failed to collect taxes from 18% of those who owe more than $1 million.

Whoever it was on the newspaper who asked “Why?” was told that it was the computer’s fault! It seems because of computer glitches that apparently go back to 2007, 448 of the 2,451 individual taxpayers who owed $1 million or more as of December 2007 were either waiting to be processed or had been assigned a lower priority than the other cases. Makes one wonder who programmed the computer and who determines priority?

The 448 delinquent accounts totaled $1.2 billion, and almost half had been uncollected for more than a year.

Is this the best the IRS can do? Who is watching the IRS? Who is watching the people who are running the computers? Who is trying to fix the glitch? Who is watching to see that it gets done? Who in our government can set this right? Who are these people who owe more than $1 million? Is there a reason they aren’t paying their taxes? Is the IRS going after them with the same vengeance as they are doing for the little hourly people who live from paycheck to paycheck and get behind on their taxes? Are the computers still broken? Have they been fixed? How hard is the Treasury Department working to rectify what their own audit showed them? To whom are they accountable? Where does the buck stop on this one?

In the scheme of things, when we are daily hearing about trillions of dollars, $1.2 billion may seem like small potatoes to the government, but I’m afraid we, the people, don’t think it is small potatoes and we’d like something done about it immediately.