Fuck the Poor

It's nearing the time of the new year when employees receive last year's W2s and whatnot. And I just read this article on how hundreds of thousands [MSM speak for upwards of a million] of poor people [mostly families] with an average income of $13K had their 2004 returns marked as fraudulent and their returns will subsequently be frozen for years to come.

The taxpayers, whose average income was $13,000, were not told that they were suspected of fraud, the advocate said in her annual report to Congress. The advocate, Nina Olson, said her staff sampled suspected returns and found that, at most, one in five was questionable.

A computer program selected the returns as part of the questionable refund program run by the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service. In some cases, the criminal division ordered that taxpayers be given no hint that they were suspected of fraud, the report said.

One in five!? Heck of a job, programmers. Give them a Presidential Medal of Freedom or whatever they're called.

And to add insult to injury?

Ms. Olson said that 66 percent of those taxpayers who pressed for their refunds were found to be due all the money they sought or even more than they asked for.

How about all people earning over $1M gross be subjected to an audit? Freeze their assets while the audit proceeds from their anus through their colon into their respitory tract.

Stop fucking the poor!

Comments

[Becky]

Okay, marking the returns of low-income families as fradulent and not telling them is bad for the families and sounds like a waste of our resources.

But Albert, I implore you not to blame the programmers. Surely they didn't code up a "fuck the poor" routine just for shits and giggles. Either someone told them to do it that way or some of the problems are fallout from bad planning, but programmers are cogs in the machine.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of the cogs.

[albert]

Nonono, I didn't mean that the programmers were trying to fuck the poor. I meant that their scripts/programs only "caught" 1/5 of the potential frauds which doesn't sound like too hot a number. And I very much agree that they were _told_ to do so.

I am PRO programmer! I did a little SQL work in my day and always feel more at home with the tech side of companies I've worked for.

[Becky]

Thanks for clarifying--very glad that you are PRO programmer!