IRS chooses the "easy" target = the poor

Once again, these are painfully misplaced priorities that are only exacerbating much larger societal, political problems. There's general mistrust of the poor and marginalized while a blind eye is turned toward wealthy, corporate fraud cases. Basically, they see about $9 billion of EITC "fraud" money -- these are poor people. They can't afford tax prep help. At best the go to some sort of predatory lender like H&R Block who is already scamming they (and all taxpayers) out of those EITC funds. Only 40% of eligible folks have ever even HEARD of the program.

The rest of the country (wealthy, corporations, joe schmoe) avoid $340 billion....that's also fraud.

$9 billion vs. $340 billion

Where do they focus? The $9 billion from poor folks. I'm not trying to justify fraud; it's all bad and should be stopped. But there has been an intentional shift AWAY from tracking down the corporate funneling of major sums of money.

This isn't even really about fraud in our tax system. This is about an inherent, intentional and (finally) increasingly public shift of philosophical priorities away from building a community and country where "all" are created equal to one favoring a very conservative, selfish ideology where you bend and break the rules as much as possible in order to get ahead.

This is sick.

Read more with links to background here on the Mother Jones blog:

Auditing the Poor
By Bradford Plumer
The IRS stops going after corporations and starts hunting down the poor
January 10, 2006