It will never change unless there are penalties for the IRS employees who are in charge of overseeing the program.

IRS is still paying billions in bogus tax credits to the poor

The IRS is still paying more than $10 billion a year in bogus payments to the poor under the Earned Income Tax Credit, the agency’s auditor said in a new report released Tuesday that says about a quarter of all payments are improper.

Despite a 2010 law requiring agencies to crack down on improper payments, the IRS is still deeply in arrears, the Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration said.

In 2013, the agency paid out between $13.3 billion and $15.6 billion in bad payments, accounting for up to 26 percent of all EITC payments.

The EITC is one of the government’s chief poverty-fighting programs. It is a refundable tax credit paid to the working poor, as an incentive to keep them in the workforce.

But it’s also rife with illegitimate claims — indeed, it’s the IRS’s only program deemed “high-risk” by the Office of Management and Budget.

The IRS acknowledged it’s been slow to respond to the 2010 federal law requiring it to come up with a strategy to combat bad payments, but said it is making progress in meeting White House guidelines.

IRS officials also disputed some of the way the inspector general calculated the bogus payments, saying they should be considered part of the “tax gap,” rather than improper payments. The tax gap is the amount that taxpayers underpay to the IRS.

A number of bogus EITC claims are submitted by tax preparers on behalf of their clients. The IRS had tried to come up with a licensing scheme to cut down on bad payments, but federal courts struck that program down, leaving the agency struggling with ways to police tax preparers.

One you become an IRS bureaucrat you have sinecure no matter how incompetennt or mendacious you are.