Our mistake, but you pay.The Earned Income Tax Credit The United States federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a refundable tax credit that reduces or eliminates the taxes that low-income married working people pay (such as payroll taxes) and also frequently operates as a wage subsidy for low-income workers. promised to be a great boon Boon A general term that refers to a benefit or improvement for investors. This can include such things as increased dividends, a stock market rally and stock buybacks. Notes: for the working poor, the very people who most deserved a helping hand. Yet many of them don't take advantage of it. The reason is that it is way too complicated. "It's so complex that the IRS An abbreviation for the Internal Revenue Service, a federal agency charged with the responsibility of administering and enforcing internal revenue laws. publishes more than 50 pages of instructions," writes Prof. Dorothy Brown of the Washington & Lee University School of Law in a New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times op-ed. "It is so complex that a Government Accountability Office The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of the United States Congress, and thus an agency in the Legislative Branch of the United States Government. report showed that taxpayers, tax return preparers, and IRS staff members regularly made mistakes while calculating and administering it." Congress has attempted to deal with the problem by pressing the IRS to audit more low-income returns. The result is that a disproportionate amount of the IRS audit effort has gone to taxpayers who, even squeezed to the maximum, can offer little more to the treasury when the obvious targets of the auditors should be rich cheats from whom the take could be substantial. Instead of auditing the poor, the obvious solution is for Congress to simplify the law and restore the credit to what Prof. Brown describes as its original purpose--"rewarding the poor for working, not penalizing them for being poor." |
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