It's No Wonder People Think the IRS is Evil

This just in... the New York Times reported today that "tax refunds sought by hundreds of thousands of poor Americans have been frozen and their returns labeled fraudulent, blocking refunds for years to come." The article focuses on a report by the IRS's taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson:

"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... 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."

On a happier note, it's good to know that my tax return has less of a chance of being held up, what with the IRS spending so much of its resources freezing legitimate payments to low-income single parents.