Showing posts with label Government Accountability Office. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Government Accountability Office. Show all posts

Monday, April 14, 2014

GAO Audit: 17 Of 19 Paid Tax Preparers Got It Wrong --IRS Code is just a tad...complicated!

April 14, 2014 CNBC , Government Accountability Office 0 Comments
By John Waggoner, Apr. 9, 2014, Cnbc.com

Tax preparers got the results of an audit from the Government Accountability Office on Tuesday. Let's just say things didn't go well.

The GAO's report cited a small undercover study of 19 paid preparers in February, chosen randomly in states that do not regulate tax preparers. The findings:

• Seventeen of 19 preparers made mistakes.

• Errors ranged from giving the taxpayer refunds $52 less than due to a refund of $3,718 more than due.

• Most frequent error: not reporting tips (12 of 19 returns).

Unfortunately, the report didn't come as a surprise. The GAO surveyed taxpayer errors from 2006 through 2009 and found that tax returns prepared by preparers had a higher estimated percent of errors—60 percent—than self-prepared returns—50 percent.

 Read the full story:  www.cnbc.com


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Thursday, March 20, 2014

CNS News: "Postal Service Faces $100B in Debts and Unfunded Benefits"

March 20, 2014 Government Accountability Office , House Subcommittee on Federal Workforce 2 Comments
CNSNews.com – The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) currently owes $99.8 billion in benefit payments to its current and retired workers but does not have the money, and if Congress does not act to fix the problem, the Postal Service may have to “implement contingency plans to ensure that mail delivery continues,” according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
“At the end of fiscal year 2013,” said the GAO, “USPS had about $100 billion in unfunded liabilities: $85 billion in unfunded liabilities for benefits, including retiree-health, pension, and workers’ compensation liabilities, and $15 billion in outstanding debt to the U.S. Treasury—the statutory limit.”
“USPS continues to be in a serious financial crisis, with insufficient revenue to cover its expenses and financial obligations, a continuing decline in profitable First-Class Mail volume, increasing unfunded benefit liabilities, and borrowing limitations due to having reached its $15 billion statutory debt [borrowing] limit,” said Frank Todisco, a GAO chief actuary, in prepared testimony before the House Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, U.S. Postal Service and the Census on Mar. 13.   (See USPS Action Needed.pdf)
Read the full story:  www.cnsnews.com 
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Tuesday, March 18, 2014

The Weekly Standard: Obamacare vs. Medicare

March 18, 2014 Andy Griffith , Clinton Administration 0 Comments
Source:  The Weekly Standard
By Jeffrey H. Anderson, Mar. 10. 2014

One of President Obama’s greatest political challenges has been hiding the fact that Obamacare is largely financed by siphoning huge sums of money out of Medicare. In particular, Obamacare cuts—or guts—Medicare Advantage, the popular program that allows seniors to get their Medicare benefits through private insurers. In fact, it’s only these Medicare Advantage cuts that allow the Congressional Budget Office to pretend that Obamacare won’t raise deficits—an implausible notion that polling indicates only a very small percentage of particularly credulous citizens believe.
Late on Friday, February 21, in a 148-page, after-hours communication, the Obama administration declared that cuts to Medicare Advantage, long put off, will finally take effect in 2015. Predictably, and understandably, many conservatives responded by criticizing the announcement.
The cuts are bad in and of themselves, but cuts to the program have been a part of Obamacare’s written text from day one. So the real question is not whether Obamacare will cut Medicare Advantage; it’s whether the Obama administration—which doesn’t want those cuts to become evident when Medicare’s open-enrollment period begins on October 15, less than three weeks before Election Day—will take unilateral, lawless executive action to stop the cuts from taking place. That’s what has happened to date.
In the lead-up to Obama’s reelection, he and his administration weren’t satisfied with having mailed out full-color, taxpayer-funded propaganda brochures and run millions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded TV ads featuring Andy Griffith, all touting Obamacare to seniors. They knew that such nonsense would quickly be exposed if Obamacare’s prescribed Medicare Advantage cuts were to take effect: Seniors would have started noticing those cuts on October 15, 2012.
To avoid that, the Obama administration launched an $8.3 billion “demonstration project.” The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services say such projects are meant “to test and measure the effect of potential program changes.” This one, though, was a shameless and almost certainly illegal effort to hide Obamacare’s Medicare Advantage cuts from seniors until they could no longer express their displeasure at the ballot box. How big a tally is $8.3 billion? It’s about seven times what Obama’s campaign raised in total.


Read the full story:  www.weeklystandard.com


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