A new report from the Migration Policy Institute calculates that:
The US government spends more on its immigration enforcement agencies than on all of its principal criminal federal law enforcement agencies combined. In FY 2012, spending for CBP, ICE and US-Visit reached nearly $18 billion. This amount exceeds by nearly 24% total spending by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Secret Service, US Marshals Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) which stood at $14.4 billion in FY 2012.
In other words, the Federal government spends more on preventing trade than on preventing murder, rape and theft. I call it the anti-nanny state. It’s hard to believe that this truly reflects the American public’s priorities.
Tax Analysts Blog: The Coverup Is Usually Worse Than the Crime, by Christopher Bergin:
[D]o we have a coverup at the IRS? Has a crime been committed? I don’t know. What I do know is that I am deeply disturbed by all this.
Maybe it’s just sloppy record-keeping, which would be bad enough. Most of the government’s business is now conducted digitally, and those records need to be properly handled. Or is it worse? Is the IRS deliberately keeping things from the public? Excuse my cynicism, but the IRS’s penchant for secrecy is what led Tax Analysts, using the new Freedom of Information Act, to sue the agency in the 1970s to force it to release private letter rulings. There have been several subsequent lawsuits to pry records that should have been public out of the agency’s hands. ...
Maybe it’s just sloppy record-keeping, which would be bad enough. Most of the government’s business is now conducted digitally, and those records need to be properly handled. Or is it worse? Is the IRS deliberately keeping things from the public? Excuse my cynicism, but the IRS’s penchant for secrecy is what led Tax Analysts, using the new Freedom of Information Act, to sue the agency in the 1970s to force it to release private letter rulings. There have been several subsequent lawsuits to pry records that should have been public out of the agency’s hands. ...
[T]he real problem here is that the IRS can’t make this story go away, and that starts smelling like a coverup. I know tax professionals who are now starting to think the worst and who are having trouble getting behind the IRS. And I am one of them. ...
- Forbes, Paul Reddam's KPMG Tax Shelter Stunk In More Ways Than One, by Peter J. Reilly
- Mauled Again, The Contagiousness of Tax Noncompliance, by Jim Maule
- Newsweek, How Credit Suisse Got Off Easy, by Lynnley Browning
- Newsweek, IRS Will Now Accept an ‘I Was Clueless’ Defense for Offshore Tax Evaders, by Lynnley Browning