November 24, 2014
America’s Cluster- Bomb Congress
by James Bovard
Tens of thousands of Americans have been
bushwhacked by a single arcane sentence in a
673-page law Congress enacted six years ago. The
IRS is seizing both federal and state tax refunds
for individuals whom the Social Security
Administration accuses of having received
excessive benefits years ago. But the government
often has zero evidence of the overpayments, and
the feds have sought to hold people liable for
the alleged debts of their long-dead parents.
The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008
contained more than 275,000 words shoveling out
benefits far and wide. But the hubbub this year
arises from a single sentence in Section 14219:
“Notwithstanding any other provision of law,
regulation, or administrative limitation, no
limitation on the period within which an offset
may be initiated or taken pursuant to this section shall be effective.”
Before that law, federal agencies had a ten-year
statute of limitation for collecting debts alleged to be due them.
Thanks to that 2008 farm bill, the IRS is
hammering taxpayers for the Social Security
benefits their deceased parents received in the
1970s or earlier. The Washington Post noted in
April, “Since the drive to collect on very old
debts began in 2011, the Treasury Department has
collected $424 million in debts that were more than 10 years old.”
This scandal has been brewing but only recently
showed up on the Beltway radar. Last year a
report by NBC Channel 5 Chicago noted that,
thanks to that 2008 provision, “anyone overpaid
by a federal agency, at any time in their life,
can now be tracked down and put on the hook for debts that are decades old.”
No one in Congress would take credit or blame for
crafting that sentence in the 2008 farm bill. It
is still unclear who authored that provision
(which may have been inserted into the bill at
the behest of some federal agency).
In many cases, agencies have zero evidence that
people were actually overpaid. But all they need
do is make the assertion and the IRS will
redirect people’s tax refunds into the Treasury’s
coffers. CNBC noted that the seizure-notification
“letters the government sends to unsuspecting
taxpayers are frightening, use accusatory
language, and include other financial threats.”
Social Security exploited that 2008 provision to
target 400,000 taxpayers who it claimed
“collectively owe $714 million on debts more than
10 years old.” In many cases, Social Security had
the IRS seize tax refunds from people whose
parents had died decades ago. For alleged debts
of deceased parents, “the government doesn’t look
into exactly who got the overpayment; the policy
is to seek compensation from the oldest sibling
and work down through the family until the debt
is paid,” the Post noted. Similar methods are
favored by loan sharks, but automatically seizing
tax refunds means the government doesn’t need to
break thumbs to snare money. Streamlined
administrative procedures prevent embarrassing
photo ops of G-men fleecing their targets.
Social Security began paying out benefits in
1940, so there is nothing to prevent the
government from expanding its grab to include
alleged overpayments to people’s grandparents.
Perhaps the Interior Department could arrange for
the IRS to begin seizing tax refunds of persons
whose great-great-grandparents are thought to
have seized more than the permitted 160 acres of
land in the great Oklahoma Land Rush of 1893.
After the Post splayed that story on its front
page, acting Social Security Commissioner Carolyn
Colvin announced that the agency would cease
having the IRS confiscate tax refunds for alleged
overpayments more than 10 years old, “pending a
thorough review of our responsibility and
discretion under the current law.” But even
alleged debts that are eight or nine years old
can be nightmares to disprove when people are
blindsided by Uncle Sam. Colvin also declared,
“If any Social Security beneficiary believes they
have been incorrectly assessed with an
overpayment under this program, I encourage them
to request an explanation or seek options to
resolve the overpayment.” It was supposed to be
comforting to people that they were permitted to
“request an explanation.” But that is scant
consolation from an agency that had been snubbing
for years people’s requests for explanations on seized tax refunds
The Post effectively declared victory after
Colvin’s announcement and after the primary
victim in its article federal employee Mary
Grice received a refund of her seized tax
refund. But the plundering continued fast and
furious. A week after Tax Day, the feds seized a
$33 refund owed to a Navy employee living in
Maryland because of an alleged overpayment to his
father, who died in 1985. One lawyer lamented,
“It’s really very sad: The class of people
affected by this policy can be defined as people
who lost a parent at an early age.”
A Social Security spokeswoman told the Post, “We
believe that the overpayments of the individuals
receiving notices in the last few days had
already been referred to Treasury, were already
in the pipeline for processing, and the
processing of those cases could not be stopped.”
The processing will presumably stop after Social
Security commandeers all the money it wants. The
agency also made clear that it was not abandoning
seizures: “While referral of cases [more than 10
years old] to Treasury have [sic] been halted,
there has been no change in policy pending the
agency’s review.” Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.)
responded to the uproar by proposing the SPIT
(Stop Punishing Innocent Taxpayers) Act.
The debtors’ prison
It was predictable that nullifying the statute of
limitations on government debt collection would
lead to gross abuses of American citizens.
Similar outrages have occurred with federal
environmental enforcement against wetland owners,
with asset-forfeiture proceedings against
innocent property owners, and against small
businesses targeted to help IRS agents fill their
quota of seizures and levies. Unfortunately, most
congressmen don’t give a damn about any injustice
that profits the federal government. Several
senators condemned the Social Security
Administration for snatching the tax refunds of
sons and daughters to settle ancient alleged
debts of their parents. But once the media
spotlight shifts, it is unlikely that Congress
will repeal the 2008 sentence that granted
federal agencies vast power over Americans.
The controversy over the tax-refund seizures is
another example of our dysfunctional Attention
Deficit Democracy. Congress routinely enacts
massive laws that are neither read nor understood
by the vast majority of House and Senate members.
Last January Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.)
declared that “nobody” read the 1,528-page
trillion-dollar spending bill that Congress
enacted. How long will it take for Americans to
learn of the all the surprises included in the
959-page farm bill Congress enacted in February?
It took less than two months before farm-state
House and Senate members were indignant about how
the law was being interpreted and evaded.
Ignorance of the law is an excuse only for the
members of Congress who voted for the law.
For them, reckless legislating is a lifestyle,
not a crime. Members of Congress will object that
it is unreasonable or unfair to expect them to
read or understand everything they vote on. But
if they cannot be expected to know what they are
doing, that proves they are doing too much, that
their political power exceeds their mental grasp.
Once they are routinely voting on things they
have not read and do not understand, we are left
with a blind trust in their good characters, or
in the good intentions of whoever is pulling the
strings behind the scenes or whichever lobby is actually writing the bills.
The massive bills that Congress routinely enacts
nowadays often resemble legislative cluster
bombs. A cluster bomb scatters hundreds of small
bomblets across a wide landscape. The bomblets
can lie dormant in the landscape for years
waiting to kill or maim children or anyone else
who takes an unlucky step nearby.
Similarly, arcane provisions in legislation can
suddenly explode under people peacefully going
about their daily routine in every nook and
cranny in the nation. The victims are shocked to
see their lives disrupted by senseless decrees
that no one seemed to notice when a law was
enacted. The worst cases will spawn a brief
flurry of news coverage after which the media and
Congress will return to championing new laws to
protect people against themselves.
The reckless seizure of tax refunds based on the
puniest pretexts is a harbinger of how the feds
will enforce Obamacare penalties for individuals
without federally approved health-insurance
policies. Their tax refunds will be preemptively
commandeered. The burden will be on the citizen
to hire a lawyer and fight the feds in their own
courts to get due process. Good luck, chumps!
“Freedom under the law” increasingly means
freedom to be fleeced by federal agencies.
The nullification of the statute of limitations
on federal debt collection is a step towards
turning the nation into a giant debtors’ prison
to serve politicians and bureaucrats. And there
is seemingly no way to exact retribution on the
legislators whose negligence spawns injustices far and wide.
This article was originally published in the
August 2014 edition of
<http://fff.org/explore-freedom/journal/>Future of Freedom.
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/americas-cluster-bomb-congress/
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