We're resurrecting a few of our past reports with Halloween-like happenings in tax administration.
Keep reading if you dare...
👻 Ghostbusters 👻
Ghosts usually stick to haunted houses. But there's a type that haunts tax collectors and investigators at the IRS.
"Ghost Employers" are businesses that collect employment taxes. But when it comes time to filing employment tax returns, they disappear. We reported that the IRS's Criminal Investigation function worked 33 Ghost Employer cases that led to a successful prosecution with an average restitution amount of $1.3 million.
Read what else our report revealed.
🕷️ Creepy Crawlers 🕷️
One place you can find them? A cave. We went in one – ok, not a real one – but a man-made underground complex in Missouri the IRS uses to store certain tax forms.
We visited the cave to follow-up on employees' safety concerns and found some weren't addressed. For example, covering wasn’t installed in the parking lot to protect cars and people from falling rocks and debris.
Despite not meeting safety standards, we found ladders are used sometimes to retrieve boxes that can weigh up to 50 pounds from shelves as high as 13 feet. In fact, at the time of our visit, three of the five IRS employees were on light duty because of workplace injuries.
Read what else we discovered when we went spelunking.
🧟 The Living Dead 🧟
The IRS locks a deceased taxpayer’s account to prevent someone from using their personal information to file a fraudulent tax return. But if an account is erroneously locked, legitimate taxpayers cannot file a tax return and receive a refund.
We identified more than 20,000 taxpayers whose accounts were incorrectly locked as deceased.
To fix this issue, the IRS implemented new programming to annually reconcile date of death information with the Social Security Administration.
Unlock the full report.
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