800,000 illegal aliens will be eligible for more than $2 billion in tax giveaways thanks to President Obama’s amnesty according to a new calculation by the Joint Committee on Taxation.
The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which is Congress’s official scorekeeper for tax legislation, calculated that illegal immigrants who are approved for the amnesty would have filed 800,000 EITC claims over the next decade. Most of those will come between 2017 and 2020, the analysts said.
The government would spend about $400 million on refunds in 2017, $1.1 billion in 2018, $400 million in 2018 and $100 million in 2020, the JCT calculated. It figured it would take the IRS a year to get up and running, so 2016 isn’t included.
Obama’s amnesty would give millions of illegal aliens a Social Security number which would automatically qualify them for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
Now Congress passed legislation back in 1996 to prevent illegals from accessing tax credits like the EITC. But the IRS simply spun their own interpretation of the law.
The law allows anyone to file for up to three years of back-refunds. But applying that to illegal immigrants who have newly gained a Social Security number stems from a 2000 IRS legal counsel ruling.
“There is no requirement that the taxpayer, taxpayer’s spouse, or qualifying child have an SSN before the close of the taxable year,” Mary Oppenheimer, the IRS’s acting assistant chief counsel, said in the 2000 memo. “There is also no requirement that the return on which the SSN is reported and the EIC is claimed be an original, timely filed return. Thus, the EIC can be claimed on an amended return.”
Now, Senator Grassley is trying to make it 100% clear in statutory language that illegal immigrants cannot make back dated claims on the U.S. Treasury since the IRS is trying to make it as difficult as possible to get to the bottom of this.
Initially, Commissioner John Koskinen indicated to Mr. Grassley that an illegal immigrant would have had to file a return in order to go back and claim a previous credit.
A week later, however, he admitted a “lack of clarity” and told Rep. Mick Mulvaney, South Carolina Republican, that even illegal immigrants who hadn’t filed returns could go back and file them for three previous years — though they’d have to be able to prove their earnings for those years.
Then, last week, Mr. Koskinen again confused the issue when Sen. John Boozman, Arkansas Republican, asked whether illegal immigrants could claim the refund even if they were working off the books and hadn’t paid taxes.
“No,” Mr. Koskinen replied. “They basically have to, if they want to file an amended return, they have to file for the income they earned.”
Tax experts, though, said illegal immigrants can claim the credit even if they didn’t pay taxes before, and said Mr. Koskinen had been correct when he was talking to Mr. Mulvaney.
Undoubtedly, community organizers are already flooding the illegal alien community and letting them know how to tap into this free source of cash courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.
