Yearly Archives: 2016

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Data Book is published annually by the IRS and contains statistical tables and organizational information on a fiscal year basis. The report provides data on collecting the revenue, issuing refunds, enforcing the law, assisting the taxpayer, and the budget and workforce.

Highlights of this year's 2015 Data Book

• During FY 2015, the IRS collected more than $3.3 trillion, processed more than 243 million tax returns and other forms, and issued over $403 billion in tax refunds.

• With more than a 15-percent reduction in full-time-equivalent staffing compared to 5 years ago, operations across a number of areas were downsized, including the total number of individual tax return examinations, which decreased by 22 percent over the same time period.

• The agency’s Website continued to get heavy use with more than 493 million visits to IRS.gov in FY 2015; and one of our most popular online tools, “Where’s My Refund?”, handled a record-breaking 234 million inquiries, a 24-percent increase over the prior year.

This chart also evidences the unfairness in the Internal Revenue Code, as it reflects that individuals continue to bear the burden of paying most of the taxes every year and the only thing they have to look forward to is increases in the amount of taxes they pay collectively every year.

I can also tell you from experience that it's not the top 1% of the wealthiest individuals who are paying most of these individual taxes, its is all of us W-2 Wage Earning Employees a/k/a the Middle Class.

If you want this to change, please consider the different tax policies offered by the various presidential candidates when you vote. Here are the Presidential Candidates and their respective tax plans as described by Tax Policy Center (TPC ) of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institute.

According to Law360, the Eleventh Circuit said Wednesday that an individual's tax debts were not dischargeable in bankruptcy because his tax returns were filed after the due date and thus do not constitute an honest and reasonable attempt to satisfy the requirements of the tax law.

The appellate court said it joined with the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh and Ninth Circuits in finding that delinquent tax returns fail the fourth prong of the so-called Beard test, which determines if a tax return is valid for purposes of discharging tax debts in bankruptcy.

"Failure to file a timely return, at least without a legitimate excuse or explanation, evinces the lack of a reasonable effort to comply with the law," Judge R. Lanier Anderson said in the court's unpublished opinion.