Guest Post by Mara Zebest
A recent audit report by the inspector general for the Social Security Administration found that Obama’s IRS was reluctant to penalize any employers who consistently used Social Security numbers that did not match the names. Thus refusing any efforts to stop identity fraud from “unauthorized noncitizens” using Social Security numbers that in 80% of the cases belonged to legal citizens. Defund the IRS.
Flashback video reports here and here:
CNSNews.com reports the following:
An audit report published this month by the inspector general for the Social Security Administration says that the Internal Revenue Service’s reluctance to penalize employers who consistently file W-2s on which the Social Security Number and name do not match has “hindered” the SSA’s efforts to stop “unauthorized noncitizens” from using Social Security Numbers that are fake or belong to someone else.
The audit report looked at “inaccurate wage reporting”—or the filing of W-2 forms on which the name and the Social Security Number do not match. The SSA has long said these no-match W-2s are frequently filed on behalf of illegal aliens. According to the IG audit report released earlier this month, a senior IRS official admitted to the IG that the service knows this is the case.
“Furthermore,” said the report, “a senior employment tax official at the IRS acknowledged that unauthorized noncitizens accounted for a high percentage of inaccurate wage reporting.”
The audit looked at the U.S. employers who in tax years 2007-2009 (the latest for which all data was available) had the worst records for filing W-2s on which the names and Social Security Numbers did not match
The IG determined the 100 employers who filed the the largest raw numbers of no-match W-2s in those three years and the 100 employers (with at least 100 employees a piece) who filed the most as a percentage of their payrolls.
The audit discovered that the employer with the very worst record for filing no-match W-2s had filed 117,792 over the three years—an average of 39,246 no-match W-2s per year.
The employer with the highest percentage of no-match W-2s had filed them at a 98-percent rate.
The 100 employers who filed the most no-match W-2s and the 100 employers who the highest percentage of no-match W-2s together filed 2,477,546 no-match W-2s over three years. The auditors determined that 20 percent of the Social Security Numbers used on these W-2s were not real Social Security Numbers. In fact, 42,164 of the W-2s had Social Security Numbers that were all zeros. 358 were filed with 666 as the first three digits.
But, the audit determined, no-match W-2s were more likely to be filed using a real Social Security Number that belonged to someone other than the person on whose behalf the W-2 was filed. “SSA had assigned the remaining 2 million (80 percent) SSNs to someone else,” said the report. “About 380,000 of these belonged to young children, and about 258,000 belonged to deceased individuals.” […]
The IG’s audit report said SSA staff believed employers had an incentive to file bad W-2s because they were not worried about the IRS doing anything about it. […]
The IG said that although the IRS had the legal authority to penalize employers who filed large numbers of inaccurate W-2s, the IRS could not tell the IG how many employers it had actually penalized. At the same time, a number of SSA Employer Service Liaison Officers (ESLOs)–who deal with employers through regional SSA offices–told the IG they “were not aware” of the IRS penalizing any employers who had habitually filed inaccurate W-2s. […]
“SSA senior staff did not believe employers had an incentive to submit accurate annual wage reports because the IRS rarely enforced existing penalties,” said the report. “SSA staff believed applying penalties would deter SSN misuse. Furthermore, SSA senior staff believed the Agency could provide the IRS with sufficient evidence to show an employer knew or should have known its employees’ SSNs were incorrect. For example, a reasonable person should recognize that hundreds of workers could not have the same or consecutively numbered SSNs.”
Read more here.
