Audited For Being Poor
$10 an hour with 2 kids? IRS pounces
"Rachel Porcaro knows she's hardly rich. When you're a single mom making 10 bucks an hour, you don't need government experts to tell you how broke you are.
But that's what happened. The government not only told Porcaro she was poor. They said she was too poor to make it in Seattle.
It all started a year ago, when Porcaro, a 32-year-old mom with two boys, was summoned to the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She had been flagged for an audit.
She couldn't believe it. She made $18,992 the previous year cutting hair at Supercuts. A few hundred of that she spent to have her taxes prepared by H&R Block.
"I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — 'I don't have anything, why are you auditing me?' " Porcaro recalled. "I said, 'Why me, when I don't own a home, a business, a car?' "
The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.
"They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area," says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle's G.A. Michael and Co. "The auditor said, 'You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle."
"They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money."
"Driver, the tax specialist, says it's well-known that the system targets the weak — people with sloppy returns, for example, who don't tend to be well off.
"It's the way a wolf goes after the weakest sheep."
"Rachel Porcaro knows she's hardly rich. When you're a single mom making 10 bucks an hour, you don't need government experts to tell you how broke you are.
But that's what happened. The government not only told Porcaro she was poor. They said she was too poor to make it in Seattle.
It all started a year ago, when Porcaro, a 32-year-old mom with two boys, was summoned to the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She had been flagged for an audit.
She couldn't believe it. She made $18,992 the previous year cutting hair at Supercuts. A few hundred of that she spent to have her taxes prepared by H&R Block.
"I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — 'I don't have anything, why are you auditing me?' " Porcaro recalled. "I said, 'Why me, when I don't own a home, a business, a car?' "
The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.
"They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area," says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle's G.A. Michael and Co. "The auditor said, 'You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle."
"They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money."
"Driver, the tax specialist, says it's well-known that the system targets the weak — people with sloppy returns, for example, who don't tend to be well off.
"It's the way a wolf goes after the weakest sheep."
posted by nolocontendere at 10:57 PM
2 Comments:
This is very similar to what has been happening in the Mass-state, where the landlords have established a rule which requires apartment renters to make twice the monthly rent in income, even though i know for a fact that it isn't really necessary to make that much money. According to my sources, the real reason why they made that rule was to keep out welfare recipients who had a tendency to not pay their rent.
It didn't make any difference to them how many good people were affected by this rule. It's like a form of collective punishment. Just because some people don't pay their rent, everyone within that class is forced to suffer for it.
There was a time, a brief period in US history, that lasted for maybe about 15 to 20 years, when poor Americans actually received much more help and experienced much more hope than they get today. It was sometime after Kennedy was elected in the early 60s and just before Reagan and Bush stole the WH in the 80s.
Well, thanks to the fear-mongering ways of the phony republicans, we're back where we were during the industrial revolution again, letting the vulture capitalists have their way. Ain't America great?
That absolutely sucks but seems to be a trend in the making. It wouldnt be too much of a stretch to where citizens will be charged with a crime if they don't make a minimum amount of money.
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