10 Tips to Ease Tax Withdrawal!
As we approach the end of April, I can’t help but reflect on the end of tax season just a couple of weeks ago. Today, I thought I’d put together ten fun IRS tax factoids, gleaned from Wikipedia, about the Internal Revenue Service.
1. The first income tax was a temporary measure, assessed in 1862 to raise funds for the American Civil War, with a rate of only 3%. Today the IRS tax accounts for over $2.4 trillion of revenue each tax year from around 234 million tax returns!
2. In 1872, seven years after the war, lawmakers allowed the income tax to expire and in the 1894 case of Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co., the U.S. Supreme Court even declared the Income Tax of 1894 unconstitutional!
3. In February, 1913, the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. It provided that “Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived….”
4. As early as 1918, the Bureau of Internal Revenue began using the name “Internal Revenue Service” on a tax form. The name didn’t stick, however, until 1953, when the name change to “Internal Revenue Service” was formalized.
5. By the end of the World War II, the IRS was handling sixty million tax returns each year.
6. In 1995, the IRS began to use the internet for electronic filing.
7. In 2003, the IRS struck a deal with tax software vendors: the IRS agreed to not develop online filing software provided the vendors provided free e-filing to most Americans. As of 2009, 70% of filers qualified for the free electronic return filing.
8. According to a November 2013 Inspector General’s report, identity theft in the United States was responsible for $4 billion worth of fraudulent federal tax refunds in 2012.
9. It probably comes as no surprise to many, but the IRS hasn’t always played fairly with taxpayers. It was because of one of those cases that legislation was finally passed that gave Taxpayers greater protection in disputes with the agency. On July 22, 1998, Congress passed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights III, which shifted the burden of proof from the taxpayer to the IRS in certain limited situations.
10. And if all that’s just too much for you to contemplate, there’s always hope that the IRS will just go away! The most recent call for its virtual abolishment came just yesterday, on April 28, 2105. In remarks on the subject, U.S. presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said he envisions shifting the tracking and collection of federal taxes to “some much smaller division” of the Treasury Department. Cruz went on to say that replacing the current, complex tax code with a simple flat tax would eliminate most of the work the IRS needs to do, making the agency obsolete and “irrelevant.”
We can only hope, right?
If you have IRS tax problems or are in need of tax relief, contact the experienced New York tax attorneys at Mackay, Caswell & Callahan, P.C. today. With over 30 years’ of tax experience and offices throughout New York State, we can offer experienced tax help.
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