How an IRS Agent Stole $1M From Taxpayers (onthewire.io) 169
Trailrunner7 writes: Few, if any, companies or government agencies store more sensitive personal information than the IRS, and consumers have virtually no insight into how that data is used and secured. But, as the results of a recent Justice Department investigation show, when you start poking around in those dark corners, you sometimes find very ugly things.
Beginning in 2008, a small group of people–including an IRS employee who worked in the Taxpayer Advocate Service section–worked a simple and effective scam that involved fake tax returns, phony refunds, dozens of pre-loaded debit cards, and a web of lies. The scheme relied upon one key ingredient for its success: access to taxpayers' personal information. And it brought the alleged perpetrators more than $1 million.
What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud.
Beginning in 2008, a small group of people–including an IRS employee who worked in the Taxpayer Advocate Service section–worked a simple and effective scam that involved fake tax returns, phony refunds, dozens of pre-loaded debit cards, and a web of lies. The scheme relied upon one key ingredient for its success: access to taxpayers' personal information. And it brought the alleged perpetrators more than $1 million.
What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud.
Classic! (Score:2)
What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud.
Awesome! So who watches the watchers?
Re:Classic! (Score:4, Funny)
None needed. The Government is MUCH more trustworthy than private enterprise, you NEVER have to worry about it...
Do I really need the /sarc?
sarcasm (Score:3)
Do I really need the /sarc?
Evidently yes
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You left out a bit, evidently yes because "the crew would take cards to ATMs and withdraw money, or use them in stores, the DoJ said. Hall, Goodman, and Coleman were arrested last month on a number of charges related to the scam, including mail fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud." It is called separation of powers and it exists because who watches over the government, other departments whose duty is to watch over the actions of government and when necessary investigate and prosecute those government
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Yeah I mean you never hear about private enterprise swindling their customers, that's just unheard of.
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The obvious solution is then, to remove the human factor involved. What could possibly go wrong?
[looks around]
I, for one, welcome our robotic overlords.
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None needed. The Government is MUCH more trustworthy than private enterprise, you NEVER have to worry about it...
Seriously, 1 million USD stolen by a few employees... That's not so bad. Considering the complexity of such a scam (ie. number of people involved), and the amount of money stolen I would say this is a minor case.
Just saying there are bigger cases of fraud in both the private and public sector... So this isn't a good case for arguing government is bad.
From the summary it seems multiple employees was involved, at which state YES fraud can happen. But the risk is small if multiple trusted employees need be
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$1M is really just the rounding errors based on how much money flows through the IRS. She probably learned it from Richard Pryor.
Re:Classic! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd bet the majority of criminals who get caught thought the very same thing before they got caught.
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The majority of criminals don't get caught....
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Re:Classic! (Score:4, Insightful)
Just about everyone is guilty of some crime, including some very odd felonies. You're mostly not in jail because even the cops and the balance of the legal system realize what sort of bullshit most of them are and don't enforce them.
Nevertheless, with sufficient inducement, those laws can be used on you by those who are literally minded or corrupt enough. And because they are legitimate laws, your only recourse is either unconstitutionality or pure public backlash. The second being the reason that free speech and the right to protest and even to look threatening is a necessary check on governments who are quite capable of passing masses of laws that fail to reflect fairness or reality.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If you are in the military you can also be in violation of the UCMJ if your wife gives you a blowjob so beware. Even the CO's in jails and prisons know that the only difference between the persons on either side of the bars is that one got caught.
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I worked in a military detention facility as a chaser/escort (transportation officer, really) and I've mentioned this before but I'll mention it again. When we went through the Sally Port into the secure area, just before that, was an old sign on the wall that said, "There, but by the grace of God, go I." That has always stuck with me. It's actually been something, that one little saying - as pithy as it might sound, that helped make me who I am today.
The people who are incarcerated are not all stupid and e
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Just the dumb ones?
These IRS scammers were certainly dumb. They made $1M over 7 years, and split it at least 3 ways. So they are going to prison for less than $50k/year each. They could have made more money, and stayed out of prison, by just getting better jobs.
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Well "more than $1 million.", if the USG admits it was take for a million, you can be sure that is the minimum that they know about. The big bucks are probably in the Grand Cayman already.
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If they were smart enough to realize that, they could have gotten better jobs.
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A lot of times things are not noticed missing until its too late and the hassle factor of doing anything has gone up. I lived with a con artist briefly. At the end of this period I had cause to chat with his previous roomates and landlord.
Landlord live in the same house, different unit. Landlord rents rooms, and owns a small business, cashes a lot of checks from multiple people.
Dude had no money in his bank account. He would write bad rent checks and then when the notice of a bounced check came, he stole th
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Unless they talk and the police already had them under surveillance.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/world/europe/london-hatton-garden-heist.html [nytimes.com]
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Re: Classic! (Score:2)
What's the difference between prison and jail. Where I'm from the two are synonymous.
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In the United States, the typical distinction is that prisons are run by state government, and are used to house people who have been convicted and sentenced to long terms (typically > 1 year). Jails are run by individual counties or municipalities, and they hold people who are awaiting trial and haven't made bail, or who have short sentences. The details of how this all works vary greatly from state to state. Many states that are currently dealing with overcrowded prisons are housing overflow prisone
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"but I honestly don't know how they would catch me in the first place."
Lots of people think that. What usually happens in these white collar cases is that the crime goes undetected for quite some time, until something somewhere (however unrelated) triggers a red flag. Then the forensic accountants come in, walk back methodically through everything and find something that points to the original perpetrator. The only reason this one was caught so fast was most likely because the people getting scammed realize
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but I honestly don't know how they would catch me in the first place.
If you commit one crime, you might get away with it. If you start committing a lot of crimes, you'll leave little trails here and there, clues that investigators will start to pick up on. A big clue is the question: where did your money come from?
A single crime usually isn't worth the effort, and multiple crimes becomes a organizational problem, so you might as well just do it legally and become an entrepreneur.
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And the two big ways to get caught:
1) You're obviously living well beyond your means. It's never a good idea for an Accounts Receivable clerk to show up for work in a Maserati, unless they have the lottery ticket stub to go with it.
2) The scheme works so well (and it always does it at first) that you either get greedier and greedier, or start believing that you're so smart no one will ever notice your pilferage. The smart criminals are the ones who know when to quit when they're ahead.
Fortunately for societ
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Whoever caught Hall, obviously.
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I dunno. Coastguard?
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Awesome! So who watches the watchers?
Horror film fans?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2356526/ [imdb.com]
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So who watches the watchers?
We dooo, We dooo [youtube.com]
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In this case, that would be the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration [treasury.gov] who answers to the Secretary of the Treasury who is a part of the President's Cabinet and thus answers to the President who answers to Congress and we pretend that Congress answers to the people.
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Snowden watches the watchers. And the rest of us stand idly by while the watchers throw Snowden to the wolves.
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What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud.
Awesome! So who watches the watchers?
Apparently, Congress. Feel better now?
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Well, she got caught didn't she?
Nothing To See Here, Move Along (Score:2, Troll)
The IRS steals money from taxpayers all the time through vague rules, questionable audits and outright confiscation. [forbes.com]
Why I Am a Conservative (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why I Am a Conservative (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, stupid roads and schools and ports and armies and bridges and cops and firemen and people trying to keep us from getting food poisoning and NASA and SBA loans and grants to Silicon Valley companies and regulations about how many hours a guy driving a big rig truck that weighs eleventy thousand pounds on the road next can go before he needs to sleep and safety gear on cars and standards for housing and electricity and power and water and sewage and rules for banks about not stealing peoples money or giving it to their friends (real regulations, banks used to be bad, still are) and courts and emergency help when mother nature opens a can of whoop-ass on a coast and that pesky net neutrality thing and NOAA helping people plan things like shipping and air travel around weather and oh yeah air travel regulations and stupid speed limits around schools and making sure my employer actually pays me for my work and those laws about not letting the boss grab the secretary's ass and prisons and the Coast Guard and grants that helped launch just about every company in Silicon Valley or at least got their "talent" a degree from some fancy college and rules about having auto insurance if you crash into me so you don't leave me in the hospital flat broke and borders with rules about what can and cannot come into the country because there's some nasty insects in other places that could wipe out crops aka food and clean water rules cause fish are food too and making sure the gas station sells me a gallon of gas and not nine tenths of a gallon same for the local market meat department scale and labels on food so we can make smart choices about what we feed ourselves and our kids and man oh man if I could murder the competition with my superior resources and not be called anti-competitive I could rule the world stupid government with its stupid taxes.
I wish people like you knew what numbers mean. You have one word on that list, "armies" for which the US government spends twice or more as much as the rest of your list combined. And glancing at an actual 2014 budget [wikipedia.org], I see about 50% of the federal budget has nothing to do with important services or regulations, but rather is entitlement spending, basically transferring wealth from young or healthy people to old or sick people. Another 10% is paying interest on debt.
That crap doesn't build roads or keep
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To have a government like Finland or the Netherlands requires pretty left-wing policies and attitudes, including paying civil servants well, which requires a lot of tax money. If you keep insisting on low tax rates because we don't have a government type that doesn't arise unless one has somewhat higher tax rates, I'm not sure what to say.
Feds earn 74% more than people in the private sector [govexec.com].
The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards compared data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to show that, in his view, civilian federal workers are overcompensated. Factoring both salary and benefits, Edwards pointed to BEA data showing the average federal employee earns about $119,000 annually, compared to the private sector worker who earns $67,000 per year. When comparing just salaries, feds collect 50 percent bigger paychecks, Edwards said.
Since the 1990s, federal workers have enjoyed faster compensation growth than private-sector workers [downsizinggovernment.org].
More sources:
U.S. Office of Personnel Management: "Senior Executive Service Performance & Compensation" [opm.gov]
Congressional Research Service: "The Federal Workforce: Characteristics and Trends" [opencrs.com]
Congressional Budget Office: "Comparing the Compensation of Federal and Private-Sector Employees" [cbo.gov].
Apparently our Government is starved for cash? Here's where we tax [businessinsider.com]. Look at how it's spent [usgovernmentspending.com].
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Maybe the problem is that the private sector pays so little compared to the public sector. If you want to have a strong economy people need money to spend.
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To have a government like Finland or the Netherlands requires pretty left-wing policies and attitudes, including paying civil servants well, which requires a lot of tax money. If you keep insisting on low tax rates because we don't have a government type that doesn't arise unless one has somewhat higher tax rates, I'm not sure what to say.
Who really buys that? We have plenty of examples where the US government already vastly overpays compared to countries like Finland and the Netherlands (eg, education, health care). My take is that if you double the tax revenue that the federal government gets, then fighter jets are going to cost $800 billion to develop instead of $400 billion and basic services that still somehow can't get properly funded. You need more than money to make this work.
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In that story, the many differences between the federal and private workforces are discussed. One striking difference is the abundance of part time workers (low wages, no benefits) in the private sector.
Even if the federal salaries and benefits are generous when compared to private industry, does that mean they are out of line?
Absolutely, yes. I don't believe most federal jobs are notably more valuable or useful (some have considerable negative value due to the harm they cause to US society).
Everywhere there is evidence of the shrinking middle class dating back to 1970. Does that come about because workers are paid fairly (and those at the top more so)?
It came about because of labor competition
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With regards to your link, how similar is the accounting in the other countries? It's not easy to compare apples to apples. I've had problems with that more than once.
Also, it could be that Finland and the Netherlands have better social safety nets and therefore get more attentive students and fewer troublemakers. They do have superior health care systems, so if a poor child gets a nasty disease that child will be treated rather than left to suffer brain damage.
Your opinion of how valuable a job is
Conversely (Score:2)
You could simplify the ridiculously complicated tax code, which wouldn't require a small army of civil servants to manage anymore, increase the salaries of those left, and they'll never consider fraud in the first place.
There problem solved. No left wing agenda required. I'll take my lucrative civil servant job now in payment.
Of course a simplified tax code wouldn't let you hide tax breaks for the wealthy, so I guess that is a bit leftist.
But Of Course (Score:2)
What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud.
Of course this would be the way to do it. Any losses that Nakeisha generated could be attributed to the fraud that the taxpayer was already suffering. Probably masked the losses quite nicely, at least for a time.
IRS? (Score:1)
Irresponsible Retarded Scumbags?
What? Don't ask me, I don't live in the U.S.A.
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Infernal Revenue Service (Score:2)
the Tax men known for taking down the Untouchable folks.
(just remember the IRS does not care where you get your money just that you properly (within the grimore that is the US Tax Code) pay the taxes.)
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However, if Capone hadn't been taken down by the tax evasion, they would have had proof of his illegal activities, it is a catch-22.
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Other people were trying to find solid evidence that he'd committed crimes, and were not doing well. If Capone had simply written much of his income in the "other, including illegal, income" space, the IRS would have had nothing against him.
BTW, I've had dealings with the IRS, and they've all been fair and courteous (most of these were my fault; apparently my arithmetic ability is suppressed by tax forms). I knew an ex-IRS auditor, and she was a good person, and she told me that people keep asking them
Oh No! Don't share this story! (Score:1)
YallQaeda will find out and declare YeeHad on the IRS for violating Shania law!
Damn I love twitter trolls! :)
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That's actually marginally funny. You could improve the redneck joke a little by calling it a Yeehawd. You see what I did there?
Happens more than people think (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole security by obscurity thing happens way more than people think. Why do you think e-file refund scams work in the first place? Because (most likely) when the core system was designed, it was assumed that an IRS employee was entering the paper returns received in the mail by hand into an IRS-controlled computer. Therefore, the system only does a cursory SSN-to-name match as a sanity check before issuing a refund for whatever amount the return shows (as long as the math checks out.) The IRS is processing millions of returns a year, so this is only noticed when a taxpayer tries to file their return and is told they've already done so; it happened to a relative of mine a couple years ago.
Not knowing the architecture, e-file really feels like a security by obscurity mess. Perhaps the IRS gives "trusted e-file providers" encryption keys for an Internet-accessible gateway, and the tax software just pumps the raw data directly into the main filing system from the end user. Also, once it gets inside the IRS, the data is probably considered "trusted" and not encrypted as it's passed around from system to system. People love to hate the IRS, and I'm sure that's reflected in budget appropriations, so whatever system is in place is probably never upgraded beyond skeleton crew maintenance stuff and new regulations coding.
This is going to be the interesting part of the Internet of Things push -- take existing systems and slap them onto the Internet, no matter what it takes. I'm seeing this a lot in the private sector as well -- cloud cloud cloud! Get our previously inaccessible, vulnerable product out on the Internet before the competition does! IoT!! We're Agile, we'll fix all the problems as we go! Social! Apps! Etc...
In this case, it's interesting psychology. The article even states it - people assume that their data is safe once it makes it inside the IRS. Same way people assume their banking or health data are safe, then find out it's not as protected as they think.
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One million dollars, over the course of seven or eight years, spread over all the accounts she had access to? Sounds to me like no one's life was ruined, at least.
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You are right about their budgetary concerns, but the situation is worse than you think. As of 2014 they were still using a system of vinyl cartridges as hard drives to store their tax information. And their budget is getting worse. For the last decade lawmakers, primarily on the republican side have been slashing the IRS's budget by labeling it a mechanism of evil and whatnot.
Meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
The tax code is incomprehensibly complex and burdensome. That's trouble all by itself. But because it plays out in the sprawling, no-accountability federal big government landscape, it provides fertile ground for everything from thievery (a la the linked-to story) to partisan shenanigans (a la Lerner-related issues).
The drive to make government always bigger, always more complex, and always more insulated from consequence - that costs each of us real, serious money that produces nothing. We do need a tax enforcement agency. But we don't need it to be responsible for such mind-bogglingly byzantine complexity that it can't even keep an eye on its own people's ongoing criminal enterprises and partisan betrayals of trust.
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There is a reason for it, and it's not just about governmental size, to quote an older book:
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You really need to read up on the definition of 'irony'.
Today we had a guy rail against access to guns who is protected by a group of guys with guns... care to say something on the topic of the discussion?
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I find it especially ironic that none of the recent shootings that made the news would have been stopped by his changes if they happened first thing on his swearing in.
He wants to stop the gun show vulnerability to the system, but that doesn't stop a broken background check system that allowed Dylann Roof to buy a handgun. http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli... [nbcnews.com]
He went through the background check, but because the database being used sucks, he didn't get flagged.
The changes wouldn't have stopped Adam Lanza from
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Conversely, it seems unlikely that many of those shootings would have been stopped by good guys with guns. There was a good guy with a gun at the Oregon shooting, and he waited for the police like everyone else.
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How is that ironic? She paid into the system, why shouldn't she receive the benefits? I pay social security and medicare taxes, and I expect that when I retire I will use those benefits, this does not indicate however that I agree with the system, as I could easily invest the money in my 401k and come out way ahead of SS.
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The IRS is a lot of things. Partisan isn't one of them. At least not in the way you are trying to portray :-) They will faithfully execute the orders from 'the boss', no matter which faction. Yes, even your "Lois Lerner mess" is just a run of the mill, everyday part of the show. Your righteous indignation over this particular target has been duly noted, thank you for participating...
*ahem* Your bandwagon is reaching the end of the road. Are you all set to jump on the next one? Not many shopping days left
Re:Meh. (Score:4, Informative)
The IRS is a lot of things. Partisan isn't one of them.
Except of course, we have evidence [weeklystandard.com] to the contrary. Lerner's past history indicates she wasn't going to carry water in the manner she did, for a conservative administration. And it's worth noting that the same MO in her earlier harassment attack as an FEC bureaucrat mirrored her attacks as an IRS bureaucrat and against the same sort of targets.
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She was following orders...
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No, no excuses, I don't vote for the kinds of people that would hire them, so I don't care what she did or does. It is an issue the voters have to acknowledge and deal with themselves.
Now, on the other hand:
I doubt she would have done this effort for a conservative administration.
This here is a perfect example of the kind of bullshit that your regular partisan hacks spew out in their little internet rags or on the radio. I expected better from you :-)
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This here is a perfect example of the kind of bullshit that your regular partisan hacks spew out in their little internet rags or on the radio. I expected better from you :-)
It's true though. Let us recall that this particular subthread started because you asserted that the IRS wasn't partisan. But we see here an obviously partisan IRS manager doing the dirty work with a history of partisan dirty work.
Ideologues don't trust outsiders to do the dirty work. For example, when the Bolsheviks took over Russia, they didn't keep the old administrations from the era of the Czars or the short-lived Russian Republic. They put their own people in charge and cleaned house even though th
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See, we didn't find out about this by brave investigative journalists or courageous insider leaks catching her red handed. Lerner herself planted a question to be asked in a meeting so she could let people know and apologize for it. And she only did it after discussing it (read: ordered to) with her superior, the acting IRS Commissioner at the time.
A report on the inappropriate audits was to be publicly released four days later.
It's worth noting two things here. First, the discriminatory and illegal actions kept going till that very month. If she had really caught this activity earlier you'd have expected her to either stop the activity or to tell someone about it - she did have an opportunity two days before to come clean with a congressional hearing on that very matter.
Second, she introduced the admission in a highly deceptive manner by havi
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She was following orders...
So weren't the people who gassed the Jews. We've already, as a society, decided that culpability lies with the person(s) who give the order and the person(s) who follow them. "I was just following orders." Is no excuse at all.
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I consider the Iraq/Afghanistan wars as criminal acts. Who takes the blame, Bush (Cheney), or the troops? And then why should giving the order be a crime if nobody follows? I can go either way with this, I'm easy.
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The world doesn't work like that so I don't have much of an answer. You can blame anyone you want but that doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees.
I'd only suggest that there are others who share culpability in many things and that this is one of those things. The person who did the deed is culpable - just like a murder for hire means the killer and the person who hired them share culpability. I suppose this is a bit less drastic than murder, however. The underlying principle is the same. We decided long
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I'm not really making an argument one way or the other. My opinion means nothing. The voters are okay with it, not me. And the Nuremberg Defense is very selectively applied, by a democratic voting process it seems, or a committee, in the same fashion they decide who's a terrorist [straitstimes.com]
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That being said, the director of that agency IS a political appointee, and the current one has been in fact conducting himself in a highly partisan way in order to shield the agency's upper management from
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Your projection notwithstanding, just follow the money. I would expect you to know the routine by now, but you seem to be a little too hung up on this 'nuance' thing that you like to use when, uhhh, different people are involved.
Considering all the serious things happening out there, and that the whole 501(3) scam is nothing but a tax evasion scheme to begin with, yeah, you're on a silly media bandwagon... By its very existence, the IRS is a scandal, since the beginning, and it is non partisan, they are sim
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The tax code is extremely complicated, and the US public as a whole can fix that. The problem is that we're a bit too selfish for optimum results. Suppose a Senator got more credit for cutting fifty billion dollars of government spending than funneling a billion to his or her state, and similar things happened with Representatives. What would happen with the deficit? Similarly, what if the citizenry demanded a simpler tax code without all the little corner cases enacted that give a small number of peop
Young fool with no ambition. (Score:4, Funny)
They're OS hackers (Score:2)
It's just like any other operating system. Once you know how it works, really really well, your mind turns to the thought of what you could do with yoru knowledge , if you wanted to. Most people don't act on it at all. Some people are inspired to make it more secure. Some people see it as an opportunity to be evil.
When I was implementing an RFP back in the day for a certain protocol , it just so happened that what I wrote , when I posted it to a webserver, took that webserver DOWN. IT was just a quirk; noth
Was his name Fernando Rodriguez? (Score:2)
...because that guy calls me a couple of times a month from all over the country about how I'm in trouble with the IRS, and they'll sick the local police on me shortly if I don't send them thousands of dollars, presumably by Western Union or in gift cards.
United States has come a long way (Score:1, Funny)
There's still a long way to go for this country but, damn it, we're now in a position where African-Americans are in position to commit, and get convicted of, White Collar crimes. Just 30 years ago this crime of opportunity would have been almost exclusively available to privileged whites only. Dr. King's dream is one step closer to becoming reality.
How? (Score:2)
He did his job. Duh.
Impossible... (Score:1)
WOW...I can't believe it. This could not have happened!
Tthe king would not allow the IRS to perpetrate fraud!
Nor would he permit the IRS to target anyone whose political leanings where presumed to be "offensive" to his beliefs.
This story is a non-starter... Did anyone check Snopes to see if it was true?
Once again (Score:1)
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Most republicans I know loath the IRS.
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They have destroyed so many cities in this country with their attacks on minority areas. Just look at Chicago and Detroit to see the results.
Detroit's problems are all on a couple race riots and Colman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick. Your going to see the same thing in Ferguson and Baltimore over the next few decades.
Re: There's a reason those Republicans... (Score:5, Insightful)
The IRS didn't audit a single millionaire last year.
They didn't audit a single millionaire because they audited tens of thousands [time.com] of millionaires. Unless of course you are referring to marital status. Unfortunately I can't find out whether they audited a single millionaire or if they were all married.
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They constantly put the poor in prison while refusing to ever audit the rich.
Uhh:
http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2012/01/06/irs-steps-up-audits-of-millionaires/
The rate at which millionaires are audited has more than doubled under Obama. The audit rate for people making less than $200k per year is about 1%, and it is now at over 14% for people earning a million or more per year. For those of us that believe in the Constitution and equal protection, this is a problem. The SCOTUS ruled in in Bolling v. Sharpe in 1954 that equal protection requirements apply to the federal government th
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Simple costs/benefits analysis indicates it is far more productive to audit rich people than poor people. That's just common sense, not discrimination against the rich.
Simple cost/benefit analysis indicates it's far more productive for the police to stop black people than white people. That's just common sense, not discrimination against black people.
Now do you see the problem?
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The government does not have to be absolutely neutral on everything. If the IRS was deliberately auditing people of one religion more heavily than people of another, that would be unConstitutional. In other news, the FBI concentrates its efforts on people it suspects of committing certain crimes, the US Armed Forces are disproportionately used against people we consider our enemies, and the Secret Service spends lots more effort protecting the President than in protecting me.