IRS Ups Audits of Prisoners’ Taxes
In its latest report, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) said as the IRS continued to catch frauds in their efforts to game the system, it has increased its review of prisoners’ tax returns by almost three times. Monitoring tax returns and catching crooks is never easy and the IRS has allowed more than 140,000 taxpayers to claim credits of $140 million erroneously, according to the TIGTA report.
In an official statement, J. Russell George the TIGTA said, “Overall, the IRS’s performance during the 2011 filing season has been successful. The IRS continues to face challenges relating to first-time homebuyer credit repayments, verification of the adoption credit and several energy-efficiency tax credits,” as he highlighted the main areas where the IRS needed to tighten surveillance.
At the same time, George expressed his satisfaction that the IRS was taking significant steps to weed out applications for “credits that we have found to be problematic.” One thorny issue has been fraudulent claims for credits from prisoners. For a long
American Bankruptcy Institute Reports Decrease in September Filings
According to the American Bankruptcy Institute , fewer Americans filed for bankruptcy protection in September, as consumers reduced their spending, household debt and other borrowing.
Consumer bankruptcies, which are typically filed under Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 of U.S. bankruptcy law, fell 17% to 108,517 in September from 130,329 a year earlier, and are down 10% for the first nine months of this year, based on data from the National Bankruptcy Research Center.
The ABI also reported that the number of total consumer bankruptcy filings for 2011 are on track to be down from those filed in 2010.
This monthly statement, as reported on www.reuters.com, comes amid ongoing worry about the state of the international economy, unpredictable financial markets and high unemployment here at home.
How to make your child rich(ish) with a Junior Isa
Parents without Child Trust Funds will be able to start saving in Junior Isas from next week. The biggest dilemma is shares vs savings.
If you put aside £300 a month and earned average 3% interest, your child would end up with £85,000 at 18. If you picked investments that delivered annual returns of 6%, after charges, the pot would swell to £116,000.
Such figures make a stock market gamble enticing, especially given that investments mostly beat savings over 10-year spells and nearly always win over 20 years. Thats the story youll get from the vast majority of financial advisers whose income is dependent on selling investments.
Sally Herigstad: What benefits are exempt from garnishment?
I worked and lived in Oregon. I was fired last June. I collect Oregon unemployment and Social Security benefits. Can either be garnished for credit card and hospital bills? —
The short answer is “no.” Most creditors cannot garnish either unemployment or Social Security benefits. Even if they could, by the time you take an exemption for basic living expenses from your benefits, there likely wouldn’t be anything left for them to take.
No one can directly garnish your Social Security check. However, in the past, once that money was in your bank account, it was up to you to prove which funds came from where and to prevent your benefits from being taken or try to get them back. Many people with no financial backup plan found themselves temporarily penniless while they sorted it all out.
Thanks to new federal regulations, as of May 2011, the burden has shifted from you to your bank.
Real Estate and Roth IRA
As said at roth-ira.org, Roth Ira is an Individual Retirement account that is considered to be the best among other IRA plans and 401k plans especially because of one reason, that is, the money contributed to a Roth IRA are given only after tax deduction, so at the time of withdrawing the money in future, there needs to be no worry about tax. At the same time, the money can be withdrawn from the Roth IRA anytime after 5 years of depositing the cash, without any early withdrawal penalty. This way, the money saved from Roth IRA can be used for many other purposes too.
One situation would be to use the money from Roth IRA in real estate. Read more…
Credit Card Users Making More Delinquent Payments
As the nation sat stunned by the news that the unemployment rate had ratcheted up another notch to 9.2%, and the U.S. had added only 18,000 jobs in June, the American Bankers Association announced on Thursday, that more late payments were made on credit cards and home loans in this year’s first quarter than in the final quarter of 2010.
The ABA said that credit card delinquencies, payments 30 days or more late, increased by 12 basis points to 3.4%. However, this may not as bad as it may seem, since this figure is below the 3.88% of the first quarter of 2010 and considerably down from 3.95%, the 15-year average.
James Chessen, ABA’s Chief Economist, believed that these recent troubling trends are a result of the larger economy’s failure to recover and said that the price inflation for necessary items such as food and gasoline is making it tough for many people to make ends meet. “With family incomes already stretched, even small increases in daily living expenses can be enough to derail the ability to meet debt obligations,” Chessen said.