Audited By The IRS for Being Poor

Poverty in America | Change.org

by Leigh Graham

Published December 13, 2009 @ 07:51PM PT

Feministe has a must-read post about Rachel Porcaro, a single mother of two in Seattle, who was audited by the IRS for being too poor. Seriously. In a nutshell, because her reported income was so low relative to Seattle residents, the IRS thought she was lying. The IRS, triggering enormous financial bills for the family, extensively investigated both her and her parents, with whom she and her children live. The IRS ultimately refused to recognize the children as her dependents, because her paltry wages and residence in her parents' home indicated to them that Ms. Porcaro was incapable of providing for her kids and thus couldn't claim them as her dependents. Effectively, her children no longer exist.
This is an atrocious story and indicative of the hassle we give low-income Americans simply for their impoverished existence, which only further consigns them to economic hardship. Too poor to get credit? Too poor to live near a bank? Too poor to qualify for taxes? It'll cost you.
The poor routinely pay more to access services many of us enjoy for free: usurious payments to cash checks at Western Union because they are unbanked; hefty interest rates on payday loans or “refund anticipation loans” prior to Tax Day; even higher prices for groceries because large and reasonably priced supermarkets are out of reach without a car or easily accessed public transportation. Our tax structures also can cost the poor more: a study released last month revealed that Alabama’s working poor have the highest tax rate in the country.
Back to Mrs. Porcaro and her imaginary children. Under GOP rule, the IRS had audited Earned Income Tax Credit recipients twice as often as the general public. Republicans have labeled the EITC "backdoor welfare" and tried to eliminate it, resorting to nasty - and costly - investigations of taxpayers in retaliation for their living high off the hog. IRS audits of the poor have been rising in the last two decades, while audits of the wealthiest Americans have fallen.
President Obama received praise for expanding the EITC as part of the stimulus package, though it still doesn’t reach nearly all the working poor who could benefit. Turns out, a necessary ingredient in making the EITC work for eligible Americans includes stopping these punitive, classist and unfair audits.
(Photo by NatalieHG)

Are Feds Trying to Get Rid of IRS Agent-Turned-Tax Protester?

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/rid_of_irs_agent_203.html


By Pat Shannan


Two years ago AFP reported that Sherry Jackson, a former IRS fraud examiner from Atlanta, was the latest victim in the Department of Justice’s crusade to silence any American who dares tell the truth about the federal income tax.


This writer has known Mrs. Jackson for a decade. She is an intelligent, articulate woman and a CPA. She is a wife, mother and a Christian. She also doesn’t put up with liars who are railroading the American people. She’s worked hard over the years to get the truth to her countrymen about how we have been deceived by the IRS.


After seeing an ad placed by the “We the People” Foundation a decade ago, offering a $50,000 reward to anyone who could identify the Internal Revenue Code Section that makes the average worker liable for an income tax, she began to research the law in attempt to win the prize.


When she realized after a week of frustrating study that there was no such law, she came to a crossroads. “I had to either remain an informed slave or get off the plantation,” she said. She then joined the truth movement.


On Thanksgiving Day this year, Sherry Jackson wrote to Rep. Hank Johnson of her home district in Georgia to say that not only had she been used as an example by the DOJ for their new program called the “Tax Defiers Initiative” and had served 21 months for a “non-crime,” but now she feared the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) was trying to refuse her proper medical care to kill her.


“Prior to becoming a political prisoner, I was the picture of health,” she told Johnson, before proceeding with a chilling litany of untreated health problems and refusal by officials, nurses and doctors to address them.


Housed in the medium security federal lockup in Coleman, Fla., Sherry began to experience an accelerated heart rate in mid-July. A week later she believed she was having a heart attack in the night.


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After three days in the hospital, it was determined that her heart was healthy but she had developed hyperthyroidism. But she was never seen by a heart specialist. She was given pills for her thyroid condition and told that in 30 days she would have a blood test to determine how the medication was affecting her body.


The next few weeks were an exercise in bureaucratic bungling ranging from the loss of her blood work to an eventual suspicion of colon cancer.


“I finally convinced them that I was not playing and was not stupid,” she writes, “so they ‘treated’ me with a packet for a stool sample test.


“On Wednesday, October 28, I passed out around 4 p.m. and was taken to medical and cleared. On Friday, my lips started turning black.”


For this treatment a male nurse was sent over to take her blood pressure and told her that there was nothing else he could do. He told her to go to sick call and be placed on the schedule, meaning little more than she would be “watched.”


She closes her letter to Rep. Johnson with:


“Today is November 26, Thanksgiving. I have not received the results of the stool test. I have not been given any new blood test. My neck is swelling up like a blowfish and I am having trouble talking. I have been feeling very ill for the last two weeks. Congressman, I don’t want them to kill me in here. As you well know, I am being punished for exposing government fraud.”


To contact Johnson: Hank Johnson, U.S. Congressman, 4th District, Georgia, 1133 Longworth HOB, Washington, D.C. 20515. Phone: (202) 225-1605 or fax: (202) 226-0691. To contact Mrs. Jackson: Sherry Peel Jackson 59085-019, FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, P.O. BOX 1032, COLEMAN, FL 33521.