Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri has an op-ed in the Daily Caller today on the IRS’s targeting of another group of Americans, who are definitely devoted to social welfare: adoptive parents. In 2012, 90 percent of parents claiming the federal tax credit for adoption were asked for additional information from the IRS, and 69 percent of the whole group were actually audited. He writes:
That a bureaucracy would go after organizations that disagree with the administration’s policies is disturbing. But it now appears the IRS has also targeted individuals whose only offense was becoming adoptive parents.
The Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent organization within the IRS that Congress created in 1996 to keep an eye on IRS abuses, reports that 69 percent of the families that claimed the adoption tax credit for 2012 have been audited.
Are adoptive parents prone to committing fraud? No. The vast majority of the audited returns needed no adjustment. The Taxpayer Advocate Service, which is headed by Nina Olson, says that this clean-return rate is “among the highest [Olson] has ever seen.”
The fact that the IRS has defended so many audits for so puny a result “makes a mockery of effective tax administration” and “signals that the IRS continues to underestimate or ignore the true burden it placed on taxpayers who are legitimately claiming a tax benefit to which they are entitled and sorely need,” according to a report on the IRS’s targeting of adoptive parents from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, which, I remind you, is part of the IRS.
The senator says that this scandal, too, reveals the need for the IRS to be investigated and reformed, but unfortunately, it hasn’t garnered a tremendous amount of political attention.
David French (who’s an adoptive parent) has written about it on the Corner recently. For instance, he took a sledgehammer to some IRS apologists’ claims that, because adoption provides a large tax credit, such families deserved more scrutiny — he’s pointed out, as Blunt does, that adoptive parents aren’t in any way prone to fraud (as if that seemed likely anyway). In fact, the delay of rightly deserved tax credits due to these investigations in 2011 cost the federal government $2.1 million in interest payments, while they found just $11 million in undeserved tax credits, out of the $668 million disbursed to adoptive parents.