US seizing tax refunds of children over parents' debt
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/social-security-treas...
The money quote, for anyone wondering how they can collect debt on people's children:
"The Federal Trade Commission, on its Web site, advises Americans that “family members typically are not obligated to pay the debts of a deceased relative from their own assets.” But Social Security officials say that if children indirectly received assistance from public dollars paid to a parent, the children’s money can be taken, no matter how long ago any overpayment occurred."
That seems like very tenuous legal theory, as it seems like it could apply to any debt the parent accrued, at least while they had dependents.
I'm curious if this has gone through the courts before, but unfortunately this seems to be in one of those legal loopholes of civil cases, that you don't have a right to defend yourself in court before they take money from your refund, and in order to bring suit, you have to prove you have standing, which most people don't have for decades old debts of their parents...
So I am foreigner living here with greencard for just few year, so I might miss something. After filing my fifth tax return this year I was wondering - why I need to spend an evening at all doing copy/paste from paper forms I receive in the mail, when IRS receives same forms? I.e. why IRS can't just send me a bill or a check if they already have all numbers? I understand there might be some issues with self-employed people, but I think majority's income is reported on W-2 or 1099 forms. And for minority who is not part of these reporting could be required to go with some additional calculation.
I used to wonder that as well until I bought a house and did some investing.
For the more simple returns, there's easier ways than copy/pasting. If it's just a W2, there's apps that let you take a picture of it, and it'll OCR it and populate the forms automagically.
I own a house, do freelancing, investment done in retirement accounts, HSA accounts. Except business expenses, everything else was already reported to IRS either by bank, or employer or client on 1099-MISC. If there would be a form I could just sign and send back - I probably would skip expenses completely in this year.
And for majority of people I feel like there would be nothing to report what already is not reported.
stronglikedan has a fair point with deductible expenses, but they could send a prepared statement to anyone who took the standard deduction in the previous year. Or they could send prepared statements to everyone, with some mechanism for adjusting the deductions (which should still be a big simplification).
Edit: It probably also makes sense to just let people change anything on the statement; it shouldn't matter, but I think there are lots of people that would find that allowance reassuring.
The other issue is that taxes are so politicized that there will undoubtedly be a contingent of congresspeople that think the hassle of taxes is a feature of the system rather than a bug.
Quite a bit more, as well. Did you know that a Congresscritter can set up a "leadership PAC", and spend the money on anything he wants? I've been following this sort of thing since the early '70s (sic, late grade school and junior high, then again that was the Watergate period), but I didn't know that....