By Milt Harris ——Bio and Archives--February 10, 2023
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Government of the people, by the people, for the people, Hates the People
It sure didn’t take Lyin’ Joe long to go back on his word and to sic his new pet IRS agents on the common folks.
Earlier this week, under halfwit Joe’s guidance, the internal Revenue Service decided that the prudent thing to do was to investigate tip reporting by the service industry.
The IRS plan called “The Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement” (SITCA) would be a “voluntary” tip reporting system based on cooperation between the business and the IRS.
Oh, and under the terms of this “voluntary” agreement, the public will have until May to provide feedback before it’s implemented.
The IRS’s position is that the program is trying to:
“Improve tip reporting compliance, reduce administrative burdens and provide more transparency and certainty to taxpayers.”
In an Interview with Fox News an IRS official said:
“This is not a proposal for the auditing of servers. Yesterday’s action was a proposal for comment, not a rule. Based on over a decade of feedback from restaurants and other businesses seeking increased flexibility for their overall tax compliance on tips. This proposal is not in effect and is intended to welcome further conversation from all interested parties before any rule is put into place.”
Right, The IRS is doing this to make it easier for the business.
The program would require:
"monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue and charge tip data from an employer's point-of-sale system, and allowance for adjustments in tipping practices from year to year."
In addition, the program would require that businesses provide the IRS with annual reports. Businesses that comply would receive protection from liability related to:
"rules that define tips as part of an employee's pay" and would have the flexibility to implant internal tip reporting procedures "in accordance with the section of the tax law that requires employees to report tips to their employers."
Mike Palicz, federal affairs manager at Americans for Tax Reform, sees the program differently:
“Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich, they’re coming after waitresses’ tips now. There's no reason they'd be issuing guidance on how to crack down on this if it was only going to end up being voluntary. Ultimately, the goal is to go and grab as much revenue as possible and from whoever they can. All of this in the backdrop of they told us they're not going to be coming after people earning $400,000 or less. Well, here's a new IRS rule that's focused on bringing in tips from waitresses. That's what they're focused on doing, that's what they're putting new rules on."
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This new voluntary system came about after a report released by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) found that the IRS often provided tip income audit protection to employers that were noncompliant and their employees. The IRS estimates that approximately 30 percent of businesses with tip reporting agreements hadn’t reported accurately. They estimate that the unreported value of the tips could be worth 1.7 billion.
In a statement released on Monday the IRS stated:
"One of the problems identified by TIGTA is that the IRS rarely revokes tip reporting agreements, resulting in continued tip income audit protection for noncompliant employers, and in some cases, their employees. TIGTA recommended that the IRS train its employees on specific criteria for revoking tip reporting agreements with noncompliant taxpayers."
Massive corruption and waste exists in Washington. Last year the pentagon lost track of 2.3 trillion dollars, yet the government is concerned with tips earned by hard working Americans and also has plans to track and tax every exchange made over $600 dollars.
This Government of the people, by the people, for the people, Hates the People.
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Milt spent thirty years as a sales and operations manager for an international manufacturing company. He is also a four-time published author on a variety of subjects. Now, he spends most of his time researching and writing about conservative politics and liberal folly.