House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Monday to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seeking an explanation for why journalist Matt Taibbi received an unannounced home visit from an IRS agent.
....The bigger question is when did the IRS start to dispatch agents for surprise house calls?...The curious timing of this visit, on the heels of the FTC demand that Twitter turn over names of journalists, raises questions about potential intimidation, and Mr. Jordan is right to want to see documents and communications relating to the Taibbi visit.
The fear of many Americans is that, flush with its new $80 billion in funding from Congress, the IRS will unleash its fearsome power against political opponents. Mr. Taibbi deserves to know why the agency decided to pursue him with a very strange house call.
Did you guess that this is a Wall Street Journal editorial? Huh? Did you?
The IRS audits low-income earners (< $25K income) at 5 times the rate as everyone else so it's very suspicious the IRS would be interested in the tax returns of a high-income earner like Matt Taibbi.
Maybe the IRS mistook him for some poor guy.
Could he be interviewing them for a story, and preferred it to be done in his own home?
Do we know Taibbi is "high income"? He's a journalist tenuous national profile and poor judgement. We're not talking about a talking head.
Also... have you considered other possibilities? Like, for instance,
- Maybe he is really suspected of cheating on is taxes. Butthurt right-wing douchebags have been known to cheat on their taxes.
- Maybe this is all horse shit. Butthurt right-wing douchebags have been known to, ah, embellish.
Do we know Taibbi is "high income"?
I guess it depends on whether $1M/year is high enough for you.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/what-happened-to-matt-taibbi.html
"...his Substack newsletter, TK News, is one of the most popular on the site, boasting more than 30,000 paying subscribers. Which means, at $50 a pop, he easily can clear $1 million annually, making him a member of the one percent."
I stand (well, sit) corrected.
Good lord, I need to become a right-wing troll for a year or two and then retire back in to my senses.
He's a left-winger, actually, and opposed the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.
If Taibbi ever was actually "left wing" then he's abandoned that stance long ago. These days he spends his time with creeps like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, running interference for Donald Trump and the GOP. "Left-winger" indeed.
Elon Musk said last year he leaned left but now leans right after the left abandoned supporting free speech.
In other words, he decided that the most important political goal is the ability to mouth off like a total asshole.
Gotta link proving that the IRS "audits" low income earners so much?
The truth of this situation is this: with so few real live human agents (who are expensive) the IRS has come to rely on computer checks of income tax paid by regular old wage earners. Big earners with complicated taxes like, say, Donald J. Trump, very rarely get audited because the IRS doesn't have the resources (it requires actual real live human agents) to check the returns of the high earners.
Put more simply, your average barista at Starbucks has all their earnings reported automatically by computer to the IRS. But Donald J. Trump -- plus all the nation's doctors and lawyers who earn "partnership" or "business" income -- are on the honor system; they have to report their income themselves. It is not automatically reported, by computer, to the IRS.
Repeat after me: the IRS is the police for rich people. The GOP DEMANDS that the police be defunded, NOW!
It was a story a year ago. Plenty of other links available via Google.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-audit-eitc-five-times-as-likely-to-get-audited/
Just as I stated here's what your link says "The reason is a rise in what are known as "correspondence audits," a review of a tax return that's typically handled by the IRS via letters and phone calls, as opposed to the typically more complex face-to-face audits."
Got any proof that there are 5 times as many in person audits? Or are you merely saying poor people have regular income checked by computer by the IRS, while the rich have complex income which the IRS doesn't have the manpower to check?
Thus it sounds like either “high earner” Matt Taibbi is such an egregious tax cheat he caught the eye of even the massively overburdened IRS, or “low earner” Matt Taibbi is such a dumb tax cheat that he even was stupid enough to, say, report $10k of income when that employer was reporting, say, $500k income electronically to the IRS. What’s your guess, knave or fool?
knave. taibbi is a huge asshole, but not stupid. i'm would not be surprised at all if he was cheating on his taxes but if so, also confident he did it in such a way he will get away with it with no consequences and have skimmed a significant amount of money.
Joseph Harbin never qualified the assertion about audit rates to only in-person audits. To me, a ‘correspondence audit’ is an audit, just as it says.
Sure, just like Trump did too build the wall
Good.
"Mr. (checks notes) Tabby? Great. Here are the four boxes of thin mints you ordered from my daughter. Thanks for supporting her Girl Scout troop!"
This woujld actually be great. I guess we just need to stay tuned...
Just one agent showed up at his doorstep unannounced?
Is it too much to suggest he was dispatched by some wingnut supervisor trying yank Joe Biden's chain?
I’m interested in knowing whether there’s any independent verification that an IRS employee visited him.
Agree. Checking the news, it is mostly a lot of right-wing news sources just repeating the same story from Matt Taibbi and Jim Jordan.
Not mostly. All. The usual obvious astroturfing.
Would like to hear from a witness before I believe it, & know if Taibbi checked the person's credentials before sending the person away. maybe an imposter?
The IRS has not denied it.
When did you stop beating your wife?
The IRS will not discuss any situation involving an individual taxpayer. You're saying you wish they would?
Fake news of the first order. The IRS doesn't have people to go knocking on doors... unless, as is hinted at in the article... Taibbi was a victim of ID theft and was ignoring the IRS' letters and calls because he otherwise had something to hide, and the IRS felt that the only way to inform him his info had been stolen was to tell him in person. That, it seems to me, is unlikely, but possible.
I'd guess this is something that within a few days makes Taibbi the laughing stock of the internet...
For those of you wondering, a new scam in recent years (I know because I got hit by it myself) is people filing a tax return for you, asking for a refund to be sent to them (the scammers) and hoping that the IRS doesn't notice that the numbers in the fake/scam return don't match your actual numbers (as independently reported to the IRS) at all. It's a scam that will work best, of course, for high income doctors and lawyers whose partnerships don't report figures directly to the IRS -- as most "regular" jobs do.
Jim Jordan tries and fails again...
It doesn't have the ring of truth to me. I've never heard of an IRS agent making a house call - hell, you can't even get one on the phone these days!
My strong suspicion is that there is much more to this story than is being glossed over by the WSJ piece.
"Did you guess that this is a Wall Street Journal editorial?"
I guessed NY Post "news" article.
anything bad happens to a right-wing darling, it's a librul conspiracy. of course. but more seriously, i am sure if this actually happened (which is questionable at best) there was a good reason for it and taibbi did something to deserve it.
Sorry, does the IRS do surprise house calls when they're going to audit you? This doesn't sound remotely plausible.
What could they possibly want to learn from him? Anyone with a complicated 7 figure income (9 counting after the period) almost certainly has an accountant doing his taxes, so he's going to have to talk to the accountant anyway.
I've never been audited, but the last time I had to deal with getting an error on a tax return resolved, they contacted me via good old USPS.
Maybe he's playing coy and not responding...
From the article:
Wait a sec. So he didn't have his 2018 return accepted in 2019? You know, under Trump? Or did he string along his extensions for 5 years? Nothing about this makes sense.
Ditto! We got one of those letters some time back, inquiring about a stock trade that I had accidently left off the Schedule D (the end of year report from the brokerage firm was in tiny print and confusing to me).
They got our attention by calculating a "extra tax due" by using the full selling price of that security. Yikes!! But once we had looked up and reported the basis, very little was still due -- or maybe even a refund. It's been awhile.
However, there was no surprise visit, no full "audit-style audit" and basicallym, no big fuss. I have never had "problems" in my rare interactions with the IRS. Plus, their online tools are really helpful.
I had an IRS agent show up on my doorstep one day, many years ago, but that's because I owed money from erroneously managing my 1099 filings, and had moved a few times so probably missed some official correspondence.
Tabibi had filed everything, with the help of accountants, and was owed money, so why the IRS felt the need to show up on his doorstep is more puzzling, especially considering the timing.
As for me, it was a largely friendly encounter, no sense of pressure or harassment, in fact they were offering me a generous settlement, but I had just lost my job so was unemployed and not in a position to leverage that deal, and they left me alone after that (and eventually the account was cleared).
I do remember being surprised they made house calls, but she had a business card with a phone number to an actual field office, which I later called and it was legit.
If you read to the end of the story it appears that the IRS is interested in whether he was a victim of identity fraud. They asked him to call them. And he was informed that they owe him money. This sounds like the least intimidating persecution in history.
I remember once getting a letter from the IRS which was very formal and threatening, and I had to read it twice before I realized they were telling me I made a mistake in their favor and they were asking for permission to send me money, but offering me the opportunity to challenge their findings. I did not, and cashed the check when they sent it.
My mother had some identity fraud issue of this sort and so in the later years of her life she had to include a code they gave her to insure it was her. Another example of the IRS being helpful which sounds a lot like what happened to Tabbibi. We might here more that makes this sound more threatening. But I have a feeling this is the last of it because IRS is helpful to journalist popular on the right is not much of a story.
I'm starting to wonder if the real problem is the headline writers. I didn't read this particular article, but so many times in ALL the press, the headline overly dramatizes the gist of the article or takes a leap from the article's conclusions.
Right wing trolling to get people riled up about the additional IRS agents as negotiations over the debt ceiling accelerate.
I feel like you're falling for the click bait and bringing everyone else along with you.