I'm beginning to feel sorry for those working for the IRS

Tigerhawk has a link to this article in Cato@ Liberty, a blog from the Cato Institute:

Costly IRS Mandate Slipped into Health Bill

Posted by Chris Edwards

Most people know about the individual mandate in the new health care bill, but the bill contained another mandate that could be far more costly.

A few wording changes to the tax code’s section 6041 regarding 1099 reporting were slipped into the 2000-page health legislation. The changes will force millions of businesses to issue hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of additional IRS Form 1099s every year. It appears to be a costly, anti-business nightmare.

Under current law, businesses are required to issue 1099s in a limited set of situations, such as when paying outside consultants. The health care bill includes a vast expansion in this information reporting requirement in an attempt to raise revenue for an increasingly rapacious Congress.

In a recent summary, tax information firm RIA notes the types of transactions covered by the new 1099 rules:

The 2010 Health Care Act adds “amounts in consideration for property” (Code Sec. 6041(a) as amended by 2010 Health Care Act §9006(b)(1)) and “gross proceeds” (Code Sec. 6041(a) as amended by 2010 Health Care Act §9006(b)(2)) to the pre-2010 Health Care Act categories of payments for which an information return to IRS will be required if the $600 aggregate payment threshold is met in a tax year for any one payee. Thus, Congress says that for payments made after 2011, the term “payments” includes gross proceeds paid in consideration for property or services.

I would say "What were they thinking?" but obviously they were not thinking, just acting.  I would really like to know who all actually wrote this bill and how many years it took.  Read it all.

Tax Fraud, Illegals and the IRS

The real kicker in this article is the last paragraph.  It took  $13 million in refunds before the IRS caught on. And these are the people who are going to come after US citizens if we don't have insurance.

5 more arrested as 15 plead guilty in $13 million tax scheme

By David Dykes

Federal law enforcement officials said Tuesday 15 people have pleaded guilty in an Upstate case that allegedly defrauded the Internal Revenue Service of $13 million.... 

....Prosecutors said between 2006 and November 2009 two tax preparation businesses, Seguros Internacional, operating in Spartanburg, and Forest City, N.C., and Poz Servicios Para Hispanos, operating in Boiling Springs, along with affiliated individuals, filed more than 10,000 federal income tax returns claiming more than $22 million in refunds.

According to Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin F. McDonald in Columbia and federal court records, Katy Rivera, Jose de Jesus Magana-Escoto, and Daniel Chavero-Ramirez, all of Mexico, and illegally in the United States, were the latest to plead guilty to their involvement in the four-year fraud against the IRS.

Approximately $13 million in refunds were paid by the IRS before criminal investigators discovered that most of the returns appeared to be fraudulent, prosecutors said.Investigators estimate at least 20 people were involved in operating the scheme in which tax preparers claimed tax credits or deductions to which filers weren't entitled. One tax credit that was improperly claimed on a majority of the returns was for child care expenses. That credit can result in a refund even if no taxes are paid, federal officials said.

Read it all.

Lucianne links you might want to read

From the Washington Examiner:

Obamacare backlash sends Democrats to the foxholesBy: Chris Stirewalt

There was no health care bounce. In fact, there has been something of a health care swoon.

This one is good news for us, bad news for "them."

 
This is from the Boston Herald.

Dim bulbs at IRS let us eat cake

....But now the Feds spend $92 million on the same IRS facility where they just eliminated 1,400 jobs. The Internal Revenue Service - all you need to know about Obamacare is that it will create not one single new physician or health-care provider, but it will require hiring new IRS legbreakers . . . er, make that “agents.”

 

From CNS

Health Law Bans New Doctor-Owned Hospitals, Blocks Expansion of Existing Ones

– The new health care overhaul law, which promised increased access and efficiency in health care, will prevent doctor-owned hospitals from adding more rooms and more beds, says a group that advocates physician involvement in every aspect of health care delivery.

 

From Jewish World Review

Fools, Tools and Ghouls

By Arnold Ahlert

• I'm old enough to remember when hippies would stick flowers into gun barrels and tell us to "give peace a chance." Just for the record, those were American gun barrels. I suspect such an attempt to do so with any of our adversaries past or present would require the "clearing" of their gun barrels first — after which "rest in peace" might be a more appropriate slogan. That Barack Obama's nuclear policy is the equivalent of such naive nonsense ought to infuriate every thinking American.

This is not the most important thing you will read today but I wanted to give you an overall of what you can find on that site.

From Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism

MSM, American Jews Look the Other Way As Obama Wages Diplomatic Jihad Against Israel

Barack Obama has found yet another way to express his special brand of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel – while the mainstream media looks the other way. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Thursday dropped out of Obama’s 47-nation nuclear security summit, after discovering that Israel was going to be pressured there to sign on to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which would drastically weaken Israel’s defenses.

And you won’t find it in the American press, but the Israeli publication NRG/Maariv reported Wednesday that employees of Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor are now being denied entry into the United States. Do they have criminal records? Terrorist connections? Do they beat, murder and rape their people marching for freedom, as does Iran, a terrorist state Obama is effectively helping go nuclear?

No. These Jewish scientists and plant workers want to come to America to study nuclear engineering, chemistry and physics. But Obama won’t let them in, just because they work in a nuclear plant in the Jewish homeland.

Big Journalism is another of the sites I check everyday.

And last, from American Thinker:

DOE's Search and Seizure

By Louis Case

The feds are coming to inspect your home if you want to sell it, according to regulations buried in cap-and-trade legislation and standards decreed by the Secretary of Energy. But there are numerous legal difficulties inherent in DOE "inspections." Here are a few:

First, the regulations purportedly require homeowners to submit to a warrantless search of their property. The result of this inspection ("looking in") of their home would be to condemn real property (fixtures and things attached to the land are real estate in many states) and/or personal property.

You really want to read the rest of this one.

Is the IRS Criminal Investigations Unit Really That Big?

I was surprised to see this in the Houston Chronicle as I read about the man who ran his plane into the building:

Stack took off in his single-engine Piper Cherokee from Georgetown Municipal Airport at 9:40 a.m. Twenty minutes later, his plane crashed into the IRS building in north Austin that houses the criminal investigations unit, sparking a fire and sending two people to the hospital.

This in no way condones what he did, it just makes me wonder.  I had assumed the IRS would be extremely busy this time of year with tax time, it never occured to me the building would not have been used for that purpose.  Apparently the criminal investigations unit is far larger than I had ever imagined.