I do not know how I missed this one, but The Seattle Times reports that the IRS audited a woman for being too poor:
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.”
What’s next? Are they going to start auditing homeless people? And that’s not all:
…the IRS responded by launching an audit of Rachel’s parents.
“I was floored,” says Rob Porcaro, 59. “I get audited now and then in my business, so I’ve been through it before. But to have them go after me because of my daughter, well, I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
Rob and his wife, Patty, had to send in house blueprints, bank statements, old utility bills. Rachel was asked to prove her children were hers, as well as document the money she’d spent on her children’s clothes, health care and so on.
They racked up $10,000 in accountant bills — $8,000 of which Driver is trying to recover from the IRS.
So, if you thought you were poor before the IRS audit, wait until after it…
There is a lot more to this story on how crazy the IRS must be to go after this woman because of how little she made. But the main point is that no one is safe from the state. The poor sometimes use it to benefit them with welfare, medicaid, and other benefits, while the rich lobby the government to gain favors for there businesses through regulation. But the truth is that no one will win.
Or as Frederic Bastiat said, “Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.”
