I'm surprised at the large sums of money the IRS was willing to send out with essentially zero validation.
These people were claiming they had paid the IRS millions of dollars and were due massive refunds, but there is nothing in place to check what the IRS has actually received from individuals before cutting 6-7 figure checks?
Especially since... how long did it take them to notice?
Hypothetically someone could get these funds into their account, transfer them offshore, flee the country, and probably live out their life in a low cost of living area without extradition.
They seem to assume if there's an error they can drag the person into court, but if you have ~3 million you've changed into gold/diamonds/cash it'd be very hard to catch you...
The alternative is a system like Google's infamous autobanning. Being jailed because the IRS AI / software says you owe them millions and have refused to pay. All due to some software bug.
The alternative is we better fund and support the IRS. If ever there was a government branch that would clearly return more money than invested, it is obviously the IRS.
There are lots and lots of legitimate refunds of this quantity. IRS doesn't have enough resources to look too hard at each one of them, as the wait time for refunds would then be unacceptable.
No matter the quantities and amounts, any system or process where “I payed you X give it back” results in performing a payment without checking the assertion is fundamentally flawed.
If you can’t prove the assertion don’t make the payment, no matter how many months that means people might have to wait.
Sure. But a computer can check/crosscheck this. If someone wins a lottery, for example, I imagine the lottery provider has to send an IRS form. A computer can easily crosscheck to see if a form exists with that amount. If not, manual review.
Similarly, a simple cross-check to see if the refund is feasible considering the other filings by the same individual/entity.
Certain refunds cannot be cross-checked as easily by a computer (eg reclaiming VAT on purchased goods). But basic refund fraud on lotteries? That shouldn't really be a thing in almost 2020.
> Similarly, a simple cross-check to see if the refund is feasible considering the other filings by the same individual/entity.
I presume that it's how they ultimately caught them.
Overall, I think that while your suggestions obviously make sense, it's probably pretty hard to theorize like this without knowing the reality on the ground. Maybe implementing systems like this is very slow and very expensive (like everything US government does), so we'll need to wait a few more years. Maybe it would result in too many false positives, which would seriously degrade its value. Maybe people who could implement this simply don't care, because it's not their money being stolen.
These people were claiming they had paid the IRS millions of dollars and were due massive refunds, but there is nothing in place to check what the IRS has actually received from individuals before cutting 6-7 figure checks?