Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You

tsu doh nimh writes If you're an American and haven't yet created an account at irs.gov, you may want to take care of that before tax fraudsters create an account in your name and steal your personal and tax data in the process. Brian Krebs shows how easy it is for scammers to register an account in your name and view your current and past W2s and tax filings with the IRS, and tells the story of a New York man who — after receiving notice from the agency that someone had filed a phony return in his name — tried to get a copy of his transcript and found someone had already registered his SSN to an email address that wasn't his. Apparently, having a credit freeze prevents thieves from doing this, because the IRS relies on easily-guessed knowledge-based authentication questions from Equifax.

Comments

I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[jcr]

Taxing people for what they earn has always been a brain-dead policy. Taxes should be based on consumption, not production.

-jcr

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[blue9steel]

Maybe, it depends on how you define consumption. If you use a narrow definition that sort of tax would be incredibly regressive. If you're going to tax individuals directly (which I don't think is really the best system) then you should probably use something along the lines of a flat tax on profits, with profit being defined as anything over the median income. (anything below that is pretty much guaranteed to be cost of living expenses in any rational definition)

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[kuhnto]

This reminds me of a great episode of the Planet Money podcast: "How The Burrito Became A Sandwich" http://www.npr.org/blogs/money... If there is a Tax, there will be a loophole, and a fix, and a loophole, the burrito becomes a sandwich...

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[Obfuscant]

If you tax people on what they earn, people declare certain things as 'not an earning'.

Yes, the People through their elected representatives who write and pass the tax legislation. It's not like Joe Smith gets to decide that this year's salary is "not an earning" all on his own.

If you tax people on what they OWN, then you don't screw over anyone.

Except people who plan ahead for the future and save their money so they have something to live on when they retire. You screw over people who work hard and provide a good house and nice things for their family. When you tax what people own, you tax it this year, and then you tax it again next year, and then again next year... which pretty much screws EVERYONE -- except those who save nothing and live hand to mouth. And creates more of those as the guy who owns the nice house has to scrape up yet another federal tax to keep it, even if he's lost his job and has zero income.

Taxing ownership is a ruse to cover class envy, nothing more. Just how much of what people own should the government take away from them every year (in addition to the effects of inflation and depreciation that reduce the actual values)? Ten percent? Twelve? Just five?

Do you tax retirement plans that people haven't yet vested in, or haven't yet received? Who "owns" that money?

Do you target family farms for enforcement, so they have to come up with ten percent of the value of the farm every year in taxes? Do you care if that shuts them down because they've had to sell it off to pay the taxes?

and if you can't pay the taxes on it you shouldn't buy it.

Another voice telling people what they should and shouldn't buy. That house you bought ten years ago when you had that good job, and now you're unemployed and cannot afford the yearly federal "gurps" tax on it? You shouldn't have bought it. You don't deserve it if you can't afford to pay the taxes on it today. We know, you worked hard all your life and saved up to buy it, but we simply don't care. The fact that local property taxes can do that to someone is bad enough, you want to add a federal tax on top to make it happen sooner and more often?

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[operagost]

I'm starting to think that having private citizens pay any tax directly to the federal government is a problem. It completely overrides their right to govern themselves at the state and local level. Because the federal government is entitled to so much of the people's wealth, it is given de facto power over everything. Disagree? Then ask why every state's drinking age is 21.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[amRadioHed]

I feel so sorry for all those wealthy people bearing such a terrible economic burden. If the burden gets too bad though, there is a solution. They can always just forfeit their income and live the carefree, unburdened life of the poor.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[mrchaotica]

Have you seen our tax code? When I took Federal Income Taxation in law school, I had to get a copy of the tax code, and it was about six inches thick. (I don't remember, or care, if or how much it was annotated.) That's a mighty long list of exceptions to consumption tax.

First of all, income tax is production tax, not consumption tax, so you've got your thinking backwards to begin with.

Second, just because the current implementation of the income tax is riddled with loopholes and power-grubbing statist bullshit, doesn't mean it has to be. A progressive income tax could be as simple as setting tax rate = f(income) where f(income) is a sigmoid curve such that f($0) = 0% and the limit as income approaches infinity is 100%. Politicians would fight over the parameters, of course, and most people would need a slightly fancier calculator to compute it, but the end result would fit on a page.

In contrast, to make a sales tax progressive it must be complicated, because somebody has to decide which goods people at each income level should be "allowed" to afford. In contrast, a simple sales tax where all goods are taxed at the same rate would be inherently regressive because low-income people spend 100% of their income buying stuff while high-income people don't.

Never trust the government

[JSmooth]

This is what you get with the lowest bidder.

Password ended in a '%'

Got this error:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, apache@%{Host}.rup.afsiep.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Is this site legit?

[Scragglykat]

IRS.gov looks like a GoDaddy placeholder... I don't want to sign up there.