We have been hearing for quite some time that budget cuts are coming to agencies, and they are now here. The Government Printing Office and the Internal Revenue Service have offered buyouts, and the General Services Administration and others are looking to do the same. The Defense Department has announced reductions that will affect military service members and civilian defense employees in all branches and many DOD agencies. These cuts are real, and there are more to come as the government is learning to do more with less. Read full article > >

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State and local government jobs are options for those making the move from federal service

THERE MAY NOT have been a party in Times Square to celebrate, but two of the most wasteful subsidies ever to clutter the Internal Revenue Code went out with the old year. Congress declined to renew either the 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit for corn-based ethanol or the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol, so both expired Dec. 31 . Read full article > >

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Editorial Board:
Overcharged

Recent major corruption cases involving New York City officers were uncovered by outside agencies, not the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.

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Experts Say N.Y. Police Dept. Isn’t Policing Itself

Investigators in New York worry that officers were tipped off about moves by the Internal Affairs Bureau.

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Ticket-Fixing Inquiry Grows Into Scandal on Police Leaks

Department of Homeland Security officials have to keep many secrets in the fight against terrorism. Nick Nayak, the department’s top buyer, wants to reverse that practice when dealing with the department’s contractors. For Homeland Security’s $13.4 billion in annual purchases, “the next generation is open, transparent — much more communication with industry upfront,’’ Nayak said in an interview at his Southwest Washington office. Nayak, 46, left a nearly 20-year career at the Internal Revenue Service to become Homeland Security’s chief procurement officer last September. He is pushing the department’s program managers to talk more with potential vendors about what DHS needs to reduce security threats and respond to disasters. The conversations should happen before and after the agency issues contract requests, Nayak said. Read full article > >

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DHS’s chief buyer pushes for more transparency in contracts

Adapted from a recent online discussion. Possibly much better. There are times as all kids grow up when they need to separate themselves from their parents, be it physically, emotionally, politically, whatever. It’s part of their absolutely essential process of building their own identity. Technically they’re doing this hard work internally at every point in their childhood, but there are times when it’s low-key and other times when the internal struggle is so great that it sucks the whole family in. Read full article > >

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Carolyn Hax: A button-pushing 10-year-old

WASHINGTON — The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service has apologized personally to three identity theft victims who say they were treated rudely by IRS employees. Douglas Shulman on Thursday told a House hearing on identity theft that his employees need to walk in taxpayers’ shoes. Shulman, however, insisted the IRS takes identity theft seriously and has stepped up measures to prevent it. Read full article > >

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IRS commissioner apologizes to identity theft victims for rudeness of agency employees

Income from wages has been reported to the Internal Revenue Service ever since World War II. Starting in 2011 , income from stock market capital gains will effectively begin to get the same treatment. This closes a loophole that cost the Treasury billions every year. It takes a big burden off taxpayers. And it never would have happened without a man the Left loved to hate. read more

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Fairer Tax Reporting, Finally

The Internal Revenue Service is cracking down on a category of tax-exempt organizations.

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I.R.S. Attacks Abuses by Charity Support Groups

by Brendan Koerner Over at my own little corner of The Tubes , I try and pay close attention to events in Papua New Guinea, a nation that receives far too little ink on these shores. Remarkably polyglot and infamously corrupt , PNG is the sort of place that many young people dream of leaving, if only to earn higher wages in nearby Australia. Yet immigration documents are hard to come by, to the delight of criminals and con men who specialize in human traffic. Desperate people bent on carving out better lives for their families make for especially easy marks. In terms of sheer imagination, no PNG immigration scam can top the one operated by a man named Jonathan Baure. For years, Baure has been claiming that he and his fellow Papua New Guineans didn’t relinquish their Australian citizenship when PNG became independent in 1975 . For a fee, Baure will provide hopeful immigrants with a document attesting to this fact–a document that is no more legally valid than this . Yet Baure has a devoted following in PNG, and the ability to coax his acolytes into taking risky boat trips to Australia in order to prove their tenuous legal point. In fact, Baure is currently cooling his heels in a Port Moresby jail after 122 of his devotees tried to make it to the Cape York Peninsula . (See above for a snapshot of the few who made it all the way.) Baure, who conveniently stayed behind as his clients risked their lives, says the trip was a form of protest : Baure said they decided to take this action because Australian High Commission staff in Port Moresby had not been paying attention to their claims that they were Australian citizens, despite acknowledgment by former prime minister Kevin Rudd. “We are not refugees crossing, simply people who want our Australian birth citizenship recognised, as we were born as Australian citizens,” he said. “Australians are saying that we are not citizens, but we never revoked our birthright. At independence in 1975, they reckon we lost our Australian citizenship, but they must realise that we never revoked it. This is not a political issue; it is a civil rights issue.” Now why does that logic, so sympathetically phrased despite its legal hollowness, sound so familiar? Think Wesley Snipes. Yes, Baure is working a con quite similar to the tax evasion scheme that ensnared the man behind Nino Brown . The common thread is a belief that legal language can be interpreted in any number of ways, thus creating loopholes that savvy individuals can take advantage of. In Snipes’ case, he was led to believe that Section 861 of the Internal Revenue Code somehow rendered his domestic income untaxable . Any good lawyer worth his or her salt would have disabused Snipes of this notion many years ago, thereby sparing him a litany of legal woes. But the actor, like so many other Americans, appears to have believed that a cornerstone of American tax law could be routed around due to its poor wording. I’m also reminded of the bizarre flesh-and-blood criminal defense, so memorably detailed in this 2008 Washington Monthly story . The theme is the same: people who steadfastly believe that they’ve figured out a way to beat the system, by coming up with a fresh interpretation of the exact same legal language that caused their predicament in the first place. I’m fascinated by these sorts of scams for a very simple reason: they reveal the shortcomings of language, specifically legal language. A perfect code is capable of conveying its creators’ intent with no possibility of error. English is still a long way from that ideal. Know of any other ongoing frauds that rely on impressive-sounding misinterpretations of legalese? By all means, please let me know in comments.

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Playing the Angles