From the “are you KIDDING me?!” department, a new development in Obama’s plans to grant executive amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.
Yesterday, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress that under the President’s plan, immigrants granted deportation amnesty will be eligible to collect an additional tax refund. They’ll do this by backtracking through paperwork and claiming an Earned Income Tax Credit on earnings (read: money made while in the country illegally) from as far back as 2011.
The Washington Times explains the loophole:
“This is the problem you get into,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who demanded a solution to the loophole. “The IRS’s interpretation of the EITC eligibility requirements undermines congressional policy for not rewarding those working illegally in the United States.”The loophole stems from the way the IRS handles illegal immigrants. While the immigrants are not authorized to work in the U.S. legally, the IRS still wants to be paid taxes on the earnings of those who do work, and so it has issued millions of Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, or ITINs, to illegal immigrants, enabling them to pay up.Some tax credits are only eligible to those with a valid Social Security number. Those who get valid numbers, however, can go back and claim them.
Although only those who previously registered for an ITIN and are granted a Social Security number will be able to amend their returns, this could still amount to billions, according to the Times report.
Right now, the Obama Administration doesn’t know how many of the illegal aliens covered under its “deferred action” plan were using tax IDs to file returns while they were here illegally.For most Americans who oppose the 2012 and 2014 amnesty plans, I don’t think the dollar amount matters. It could be a net disbursement of $12, and something would still feel wrong about it.
I understand that the IRS wants to bring in as much revenue as possible, but this bizarre sort of loophole is just too convenient for an Administration that is right now doing whatever it can to impose a zero-consequences ruling on the civil and sometimes criminal wrongs of millions of people. This benefit, even though gained retroactively, will likely amount to a huge payday that Democrats will be able to paint as a kindness to those who simply skipped a step or two on their way to pursuing the American Dream.
Yesterday, Democrats shot down the latest Republican effort to stop executive amnesty in its tracks. They know exactly what they’re doing here, and they also know that 2016 has the potential to turn into a major disaster if they lose the battle for optics on this spiraling policy battle.
If they lose the optics, their only hope is to buy back whatever confidence they lost from a rapidly growing voter base.
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