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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.
Maybe, some day, Congress will actually fix some of the real fucking problems we have, with having a pseudo, tech. intergrated Government. And maybe, Hell will actually freeze over!
I hear Hell already froze over - several decades ago.
It was a particularly cold snap during winter in Michigan, with sub-zero (farenheit) temperatures. The expanding ice blew out a small (millpond-ish) dam. The water under the ice rushed down the river and overflowed it, pouring down the main street of the little village of Hell, Michigan. It was several inches deep when it slowed enough that the extreme cold froze it solid.
Since then a lot of the stuff that was waiting for Hell to freeze over has been happeng. That explains the last several decades nicely, eh? B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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)
For years, CRA, the Canadian equivalent to the IRS, has been including Web Authentication Codes (WACs) with the annual notice of assessment, that is, their summary of your personal income tax submission, snail mailed to your address of record some weeks after you submit your personal tax return.
Your WAC changes every year. Without it, you cannot access your account in CRA's online systems.
And it isn't enough: You also need your SIN and the amount recorded on a particular line of your return (or notice, I cannot remember which).
Now here is where my memory gets hazy: Once you register for online access, I think they might send a one-time code to your address, which is required to activate your account.
The only way to subvert this system is to tamper with postal delivery, which means fraudsters must take specific, intentional action and break multiple federal laws (postal acts, the income tax act, etc.). There ain't no easy to guess stuff in the Canadian system. The bar is sufficiently high, the risks to fraudsters very high, i.e., hard time.
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
I just went to www.irs.gov
The advice to sign up there may be reasonable, but the words 'sign up' or anything semantically similar do not appear on the front page. It's not obvious where you would go to try to sign up.
It's not https either.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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...
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
I was signing up for something through my bank, and it was asking me some of these questions like, "Which of these employers did you previously work for?" Unfortunately none of them were correct (this wasn't a huge surprise because I had already tried to correct my credit report information... they seem to have me confused with someone else). That meant I couldn't continue, but it turns out if you start the test over again, it gives you the same question but randomly selects the "wrong" answers. All I had to do was remember what the original multiple-choice answers were, and pick the one that didn't change. Basically that means there's almost zero security with this method of authentication.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
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?
On the contrary, irresponsible tax cuts without commensurate decreases in spending have resulted in the largest debt in the history of mankind.
We could talk about the "coincidence" that said tax cuts disproportionally favored the wealthy (i.e., they made the tax less progressive), and that spending actually increased and most of that increase was for war.... but you don't really want to admit that, do you?
It's such an inconvenient fact that deficits tend to drop due to the policies of liberals and rise due to the policies of [neo-]conservatives, when [neo-]conservatives desperately try to lie and claim it's the other way around...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
> BTW, the deficit reductions under Clinton were the direct result of the policies of Reagan and Gingrich.
Bullshit. The Clinton surplus was created by the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which every single Republican in congress voted against.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton