A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste ... I Guess Taxpayer Dollars Isn't

That sound you here is Taxpayer dollars:

The IRS doled out more than $5 billion in potentially bogus college aid payments in 2012 under an Obama stimulus tax credit, according to a report Tuesday from the agency’s inspector general that said the administration still doesn’t have a good handle on how to root out erroneous claims.

Nearly 4 million students had questionable claims, totaling more than $5.6 billion in that one year alone, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said. At least half of the students never provided tuition statements showing what they paid, while others attended schools that didn’t qualify them for the tax credit.

Other students claimed the credit for more than four years, which should have automatically earned a rejection, the investigators said.

“The IRS still does not have effective processes to identify erroneous claims for education credits,” said Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George, who said he has warned the IRS repeatedly about the problem, but “many of the deficiencies TIGTA previously identified still exist.”

IRS officials insisted they have taken some steps and said the inspector general was overestimating the total lost to bogus payments — but the officials did acknowledge more needs to be done.

It’s not just the administration that takes blame. The inspector general and the IRS said Congress could easily tweak a few laws that would give the tax agency power to automatically correct tax returns that are clearly in error, such as those asking for a fifth or sixth year of the tax credit.

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