The Passing Game

A $1-trillion fraud will be passed on to American taxpayers. This is not Fox News reporting. This is NPR reporting, and if you can't believe NPR, who can you believe? I was not going to post this story until I saw that it was an NPR story.

According to sources at Starbucks, the word is out on the street: one can put in any income amount one wants to on the website (or actually even talking to an insurance agent or to a navigator). No one will question the amount of income you claim, and the IRS will never audit it -- unless they just happen to audit your tax filing for other reasons.

But the word on the street: claim an income as low as one can without making it "too" suspicious.

NPR is reporting: 

Government subsidies to help Americans buy insurance under the health care overhaul may be vulnerable to fraud, a Treasury Department watchdog warned on Tuesday in the latest indication that troubles are far from over for President Barack Obama's signature legislation.

The rollout of the law has been hurt by canceled policies and problems with the federal website used by people to enroll in health plans, causing political headaches for the White House and for Democrats in Congress. The new problems concern subsidies that are available to low- and medium-income people who buy insurance through state-based exchanges that opened in October.

Those subsidies are administered by the Internal Revenue Service in the form of tax credits, and that's where the trouble arises.

"The IRS' existing fraud detection system may not be capable of identifying (Affordable Care Act) refund fraud or schemes prior to the issuance of tax return refunds," said the report by J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. "The IRS reported that the long-term limitations of its existing fraud detection system include its inability to keep pace with increasing levels of fraud," the report said.