By Doug Patton, courtesy of GOPUSA.com
March 27, 2006
As April 15th approaches, millions of us are again poring over receipts, records and other information relevant to our federal income taxes. After getting everything in order, we will be forced by the complexity of the tax code to take it all to an accountant or other tax professional, who will spend a few very expensive hours working through a process our own government doesn’t even understand much of the time. Finally, our tax preparer will place in front of us a stack of papers, some of which we will be expected to sign.
Now, do you read every page in that stack, or do you simply place your signature, as I do, on the lines indicated by this individual in whom you have placed so much trust? Millions of us do it every year. But what if among those papers was a consent form to sell your personal information to third parties to market their products and services to you?
This is the convoluted reasoning of the Internal Revenue Service, where career bureaucrats believe that such conduct should be allowed. In fact, the IRS is proposing new rules that would permit tax preparers to sell your private financial information, right up to and including your actual tax return itself, to marketers and data brokers.
Currently, selling client information to third parties for marketing purposes is prohibited. That would change, however, under the proposed rule revision. And since this policy could only benefit the person buying or selling your information, with no imaginable benefit to you, the motivation to obtain permission by any deceptive means necessary seems extremely high. Incredibly, according to a recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, IRS officials characterize these changes as “housecleaning measures needed to update regulations adopted before it began accepting returns electronically.”
Had enough? There is a solution.
The time has come for Americans to demand that our elected representatives come to grips with the fact that the current federal income tax code is broken and cannot be fixed.
Continue reading “Another Reason It’s Time For The Fair Tax”
