RUSH: This is Luanne in Jacksonville, Florida. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. How are you today?
RUSH: Very well. Thank you.
CALLER: Good. Hey. I’d like to make a comment that you made earlier on the ACORN tax preparers.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER. You know what, you are exactly right and I hope everybody out there realizes that the upper class of people do pay the majority of taxes, and those rarely cheat on their taxes. I am a certified tax preparer — and not that I am a fan of the IRS, but had I been able to bust these people, I sure would have. I saw daily people coming in and actually sharing children where they didn’t even have the child’s Social Security number. They had them written on paper napkins, backs of envelopes, didn’t know the child’s middle name.
RUSH: Wait a second here! You are confirming that it is the poor who are the tax cheats in this country. The poor and the middle class, not the rich. While all the ACORN babes… Look, everybody thinks it’s the rich who are the tax cheats, that have all the lawyers and people to advise them how to cheat. You don’t advise them how to cheat. You just know the law and you tell them how to file taxes according to the law to limit what they pay but the ACORN babes are helping people cheat on their taxes, and we always thought it was the rich doing this.
CALLER: Oh, let me tell you. And me personally in the offices that I have worked in, we are not allowed by law to tell them anything or tell them that they are breaking the law. We have to say, ‘You might be audited by the IRS now.’ Of course what I have done is I haven’t. Just as times I haven’t even touched —
RUSH: Wait a second. Why can’t you tell them they’re breaking the law?
CALLER: We’re not allowed.
RUSH: By whom?
CALLER: We’re not allowed.
RUSH: Who doesn’t allow you?
CALLER: By the companies that we have worked for. We’re not allowed to say that. We are not lawyers. We’re not allowed to portray the law to them. We can advise them that: ‘Are you sure this is what you want to do?’ and in the notes on their tax returns.
RUSH: What, is your company afraid of offending them or something? What is this?
CALLER: Most of them are. Most of them, yes. Absolutely they are. Apparently social services, HRS, welfare department, they do not communicate with the IRS because here’s one example. I had a gentleman that came in, he had a Social Security number written on the corner of an envelope. He didn’t even know this child’s middle name which we have to have, that or the middle initial. He was on the phone making phone calls, making sure the Social Security number was right. Now, what we found out is the person, these people… Let’s say you have a lower income single mom who has three children. Now, if she collecting welfare —
RUSH: I gotta stop you because I have an obscene profit break here, but hold your thought there. I want to hear the end of this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We want to go back to Luanne in Jacksonville, Florida. All right, so the guy came in, he’s got the Social Security number on the corner of an envelope; he doesn’t know the name of the kid.
CALLER: Correct. Making phone calls, you know, trying to find out the correct information on the child. And of course by that time you know that this isn’t a child. Of course it turns out to be his niece who moved in with him the last few months of the year. And by law, if a child or someone has lived with you the last six months of the year you can claim them for the full year, and what these people do is, like I was saying before, you have this single parent who has a couple of children who let’s say is on welfare, food stamps, and they don’t have per se an income from anybody, they’ll give a child basically to somebody they know to collect taxes, you know, a tax refund as they call it, which it’s hard for me to say because you can’t have a refund if you don’t give, right?
RUSH: I am sitting here, I’m heartbroken, stunned and shocked.
CALLER: It’s horrible.
RUSH: America’s poor are gaming and cheating the IRS. America’s poor.
CALLER: Look at me, there are thousands and thousands of dollars that me personally saw go out, thousands and thousands to people who don’t get it. I talked to my kids telling them what I was seeing, they would say, ‘Yeah, mom, we see it all the time, we hear it all the time,’ people so-and-so over in this part, given this — where they would give — let’s say if I was a parent, what they would do is if Joe Schmo received an extra $1,500 in taxes, Joe Schmo would then split it with the person whose child it really belonged to.
RUSH: Shocking, absolutely shocking, my friends.
CALLER: It’s horrific, it’s horrific, and I don’t know whether to go back and continue. I’m what you call a rule follower and I am following the rules and it’s not by responsibility by law —
RUSH: You only have one choice and that’s to send these people over to ACORN.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I’m sure there’s an ACORN office in Jacksonville. You don’t want any part of this.
CALLER: It happens all the time. If there’s a hundred people that come in the office I guarantee you 25 of them are tax cheats, 25 of them, and they’re not the upper middle and upper class. When I get the upper middle in, they have everything laid out, every insurance policy, everything they’ve ever done they’ve got a folder full of paperwork.
RUSH: How much do you charge these people for assisting them?
CALLER: Well, and that’s it. It goes by a percentage of what their refund is.
RUSH: Oh, my God, so you’re a coconspirator.
CALLER: Not me. I pass ’em off.
RUSH: No, but the company is. If the company won’t let you tell these people they’re cheating and you go ahead and file a return, you’re a coconspirator, unindicted —
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Man.
CALLER: Not me, the company is. I can’t do it. I told them I can’t do this. I’ll give them to somebody else or I refer them to somebody else. And most people when you see that they’re doing it, they won’t handle it, either. It’s horrible.
RUSH: You know, back in 1989 or ’90, I did a poignant commentary on how we need to raise taxes on the poor. We need to raise taxes on the poor. Little did I know how poignant that was, and that’s 20 years ago. Thank you, Luanne, I appreciate it.