Last year while the IRS was busy harassing Tea Party conservatives, it was also paying billions of dollars on fraudulent claims. As the Daily Caller reports:
The Internal Revenue Service sent $4 billion to identity thieves filing fraudulent tax returns in 2012, at the same time it was devoting resources to invasive politically targeted audits of not-for-profit groups, according to a recent report released by Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George.
The IRS, which is now overseeing Obamacare’s complicated implementation and collecting its tax penalties, sent 343 tax refunds to a single address in Shanghai, and another 655 tax refunds to one in Lithuania, according to CBS News.
A statement detailing a similar report filed by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found 1.1 million fraudulent tax returns were filed with clearly fabricated Social Security numbers that IRS could have detected, costing taxpayers $3.6 billion in 2011. …
Approximately 2.8 million taxpayers were affected by the IRS’s failure to catch identity thieves from 2012 to 2013, the [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] found — a time frame that overlaps with the agency’s aggressive harassment of conservative groups and its efforts to cull them from the political herd as the 2012 election carried on.
If we measure incompetence in terms of wasted taxpayer dollars, the IRS is beating Medicare by a ratio of $173 to $1 ($4 billion versus a mere $23 million in fraudulent payments).