Twisted Musings

Need a few extra thousand bucks.  Say, five or six thousand?  Well, tough
    luck.  Unless you’re in prison, that is. 

    I just watched a show on tv about how inmates in our prisons are submitting
    1040′s and receiving thousands of dollars in refunds.  Everything on the
    forms are bogus except their names and addresses.  When they get their
    refund checks – at the prison – they endorse the back and send them to
    someone outside to be cashed or deposited into their bank accounts. 

    How bad is the problem?  According to the official being interviewed, they
    discovered in 2005 that approximately 15,000 prisoners had scammed the
    IRS in this manner.  When IRS officials were asked about the problem back
    then, IRS said they would immediately correct the problem.  But it is
    extimated that IRS sent out more than 45,000 checks to prisoners this
    year.

    This is absolutely mindboggling.  How do the prisoners get a 1040  form in the
    first place?  And how are they permitted to mail them to the IRS.  And
    how can IRS make out refund checks without first verifying that the
    person filing the form was ever employed at the company listed? 

    One prison warden said he instructed the mail room at his prison to
    hold all the refund checks coming in to prisoners, then he mailed the
    refund checks back to IRS,  Two months later, IRS reissued the checks
    back to the prisoners.

    All this is a little hard to take when you read articles in the newspapers
    every day of  how government agencies are cutting back essential
    services because of the lack of funds.  And of course, if billions are being
    scammed by these prisioners, many more billions being lost to Medicare
    scams, how can you not wonder what other scams are being peretrated
    against the government that we don’t even know about?

    I have worked for large and small corporations, and they all had one
    thing in common:  if you didn’t do your job, you were fired.  There needs
    to be some heads rolling in Washington, D.C.  To allow this much money
    to seep through the cracks in this manner is totally unacceptable.  And I
    do believe a 5th grader could figure out how to stop it.