iftttwall

Politicians like to work themselves
into a lather over the “tax gap”—the amount of money the government
says it’s owed by taxpayers that doesn’t get paid. The current
estimate, based on 2006 figures, is that
roughly $450 billion goes uncollected each year. That’s an 83.1
percent tax compliance rate which (shhh…Don’t tell anyone!) is

probably the highest on the entire planet. But never mind. If
government officials have to dig through the seat cushions for
those elusive ducats, that’s what they’ll do. Even if they do that
digging really, really badly.

The latest efforts at sofa cushion excavation involved a
multi-million dollar Information Reporting and Document Matching
Case Management System (IRDMCM—yes, really). The Internal Revenue
Service spent $8.6 million on the scheme to squeeze information
from banks, brokerage firms, and the like and square the data
against individual sole proprietor and business returns.

The system doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in spectacular fashion.

According to a report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax
Administration (Compiled in September but released last
Thursday):

The IRDMCM System requirements were not sufficient. User
Acceptance Testing generated a high number of problem tickets, 50
percent of which were to clarify requirements and businessrules.
After a year of User Acceptance Testing, IRS officials acknowledged
that the IRDMCM System could not effectively process business cases
containing underreported income and could not be deployed into the
IRS production environment.

This is the federal government we’re talking about, and the IRS
in particular, so wasted effort and resources on unusable systems
are par for the course. What is surprising is the small
payoff anticipated from this failed system.

Remember that the tax gap represents something in the
neighborhood of $450 billion that the government wants to get into
its sticky fingers. The Inspector General’s report describes IRDMCM
(pronounced, “whatthefuck?”) as a missed opportunity that “could
have potentially resulted in assessed taxes of $54.9 million.”
That’s like digging at length through the sofa cushions,
delightedly spotting a couple of centavos, and dropping them.

The Inspector General recommends that the IRS roll up its
sleeves and try again, but the tax agency responds that
“significant budget constraints could affect future work on the
IRDMCM System.”

Well. that’s a crying shame.

Have you
thanked a tax scofflaw today for keeping wealth that might be
pissed away or even used against you out of the hands of the
government?

In case you were wondering, displaying giant
inflateable rats
is protected by the First Amendment. Apparently a balloon
rodent known as Scabby the Rat has been a labor union protest
symbol since the ’90s. But New York-based Microtech Contracting
felt the display of Scabby by unions representing some of its
workers was a violation of the pair’s collective bargaining
agreement.

Microtech challenged the Mason Tenders District Council of
Greater New York and the Asbestos, Lead, and Hazardous Waste
Laborers’ Local 78 over the rat in federal court. District Judge
Joseph Bianco sided with the unions—the latest in a series of legal
victories for the protected speech status of giant inflatable
rats.

From the National Constitution Center’s blog: 

Since Scabby’s humble birth in Chicago years ago in 1990, the
rat with the union label has become a symbol of protest at
different locations across America. Anyone can buy a rat, ranging
from 6 feet to 25 feet tall, from
Plainfield, Illinois-based Big Sky Balloons and
Searchlights. The typical rat runs from $2,000 to $8,000.

But how and where these rats have been used have triggered three
recent court challenges, with the rats coming out on top in debates
over the First Amendment and contracts.

The most recent pro-rodent decision came down in
the Microtech case in New York. Federal District
Judge Joseph Bianco ruled that the rat didn’t violate the
collective bargaining agreement in force, and the court lacked
jurisdiction.

Specifically, Bianco said the rat didn’t violate the union’s
no-strike clause, “[T]he defendants’ peaceful use of a stationary,
inflatable rat to publicize a labor protest is protected by the
First Amendment.”

Using the rat was a form of general speech, Bianco said, and
banning the rat was tantamount to barring any general speech
harmful to the plaintiff’s business image.

Back in 2011, giant rats won a key ruling from the National
Labor Relations Board when it held that deploying the rodent
protest balloon wasn’t same as using a picket sign at a protest
site.

Under the National Labor Relations Act, unions can’t picket or
engage in “secondary activity” or “secondary boycotts” that lead
neutral parties to “cease doing business with employers.”

In a 2009 case, the New Jersey Supreme Court
ruled that a Lawrence Township ban on inflatable
signs unless used for store openings was unconstitutional
after the city tried to fine the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers Local 269 for displaying Scabby the Rat.

The Washington Post’s
original
three-part, in-depth look at the use and abuse of police civil
asset forfeiture seems to have transformed into an open-ended,
ongoing series. Over the weekend they posted a sixth installment
exploring grabby police departments taking their citizens’ cash and
belongings.

This time they kept it local, noticing that Washington, D.C.’s,
police are actually attempting to plan in its budget for asset
forfeiture proceeds in advance. This is considered a no-no for any
law enforcement agency participating in the Department of Justice’s
Equitable Sharing Program, the program where the feds and local
enforcement agencies team up, and the local police get to keep 80
percent of whatever’s seized. This planning came to light to the
Post last week because members of D.C.’s Council are
attempting to overhaul the city’s asset forfeiture guidelines to
increase the threshold of proof and requiring all asset
seizures—including the ones that come from the DOJ program—to be
placed in D.C.’s general fund, rather than the police’s budget,
thus seriously reducing the police’s incentives for snatching
whatever they can.

And just
look at what they’ve snatched:

Since 2009, D.C. officers have made more than 12,000 seizures
under city and federal laws, according to records and data obtained
from the city by The Washington Post through the District’s open
records law. Half of the more than $5.5 million in cash seizures
were for $141 or less, with more than a thousand for less than $20.
D.C. police have seized more than 1,000 cars, some for minor
offenses allegedly committed by the children or friends of the
vehicle owners, documents show.

They’re literally just taking the money out people’s wallets at
this point. And the authorities cash in even more whenever somebody
fights back:

One case cited by the Public Defender Service involves Sharlene
Powell, who had worked for three decades as a Postal Service
employee. She loaned her car to her son, who was stopped and
arrested on a misdemeanor drug offense. Prosecutors dropped the
charges, but District police kept the car. To get her car back,
Powell had to pay a $1,772 “penal sum” bond to challenge the
seizure, the Public Defender Service said in a statement last year
to the judiciary committee.

Read more
here. The city is in a legal fight with the Public Defender
Service to try to get rid or reduce those massive bonds. The city
could lose $670,000 annually from the DOJ Equitable Sharing Program
if it can no longer participate. The program’s guidelines require
that law enforcement agencies keep the money, not put it into the
general fund.

Below, Reason TV interviews economist Bart Wilson about the
twisted incentives induced when law enforcement officers are
permitted to keep money and assets they grab when fighting
crime:

The Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) launched suprise investigations of
various NFL teams yesterday, reports
The Washington Post:

The inspections, which entailed bag searches and questioning of
team doctors by Drug Enforcement Administration agents, were based
on the suspicion that NFL teams dispense drugs illegally to keep
players on the field in violation of the Controlled Substances Act,
according to a senior law enforcement official with knowledge of
the investigation.

A class-action lawsuit filed by 1,300 retired football players
“allege[s] that NFL medical staffs regularly violate federal and
state laws in plying their teams with powerful addictive narcotics
such as Percocet and Percodan, sleeping pills such as Ambien and
the non-addictive painkiller Toradol to help them play through
injuries on game days.”

The San Diego Chargers, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Seattle
Seahawks are among the teams that acknowledged searches (though
it’s not clear if those teams were being singled out for specific
reasons). The pretext for the searches is the alleged painkiller
abuse at the heart of the class-action lawsuit.

The DEA’s investigative interest in the NFL is partly based on
the agency’s conviction that lackadaisical prescribing practices
creates addicts. McMahon, who played from 1982 to 1996, said in the
lawsuit that he received “hundreds, if not thousands” of injections
and pills from NFL doctors and trainers, including Percocet,
Toradol, Novocaine, amphetamines, sleeping pills and muscle
relaxers. He said he became so hooked on pain meds that at one
point he took 100 Percocets a month.

There’s this,
too:

An
investigation of NFL medical practices by The Washington
Post last year documented
painkiller abuse in the league. In a Post
survey of more than 500 retired players, one in four said he
felt pressure from team doctors to take medication he was
uncomfortable with. Players told The Post that they swallowed
prescriptions on an almost daily basis, frequently without
documentation.

Read the whole thing here.

Given the physical punishment that is at the very center of the
game at all levels, it’s worth asking whether we’ve reached peak
football. Between this sort of action and growing
questions about concussions and traumatic brain injuries, it’s
totally plausible that football, despite its immense popularity,
has a time-limited future.

Last year, Reason TV sat down with Gregg Easterbrook to talk
about his book The King of Sports and football’s imperiled
future.