Photo: Don Carrington/Carolina Journal

As we recently noted, longtime Long Island resident Carol Cooke received tax refunds for thousands of dollars, all to people who did not live at her residence. This was obvious fraud but when Cooke contacted the IRS they gave her the runaround. This was not an isolated case.

A full 23,994 tax refunds were sent to a single address in Atlanta, including 8,393 refunds deposited to a single bank. This emerged in a new report detailing how the IRS handed out $4.2 billion through the “additional child tax credit” (ACTC) to those using an individual taxpayer identification number, or ITIN, generally the signal of an undocumented immigrant. In Frankford, Delaware, population 862, 627 ITINs were registered at one address. In Parksley, Virginia, population 847, 100 ITINs were registered at a single address. The IRS sent $402,000 in refunds to 95 addresses in Thermal, California, population 2,825.

The study charges that the federal government’s decision to pay out these billions was made by midlevel bureaucrats and has never received full congressional scrutiny. The IRS hands out money under the ACTC even without documents showing that the children live in the United States. And the ACTC is refundable, so even if the filer does not owe any tax, the IRS still pays out the money.

“That becomes an avenue for fraud,” a news report notes, “particularly when combined with illegal immigrant workers, whose use of the tax credit has jumped from 796,000 filers in 2005 to 1.5 million in 2008 and 2.3 million in 2010, according to the IRS official auditor.”

This multi-billion giveaway is likely official policy, carried out with a wink and a nod, just like IRS voter suppression. IRS bosses shrug off the abuse of those seeking non-profit status as “horrible customer service” but the service is much more efficient when it comes to handing out billions on dubious grounds. The evidence mounts that the IRS abuses power and fails miserably at its duly appointed tasks. But now it wants to diversify into health care.

“The IRS is not merely implementing Obamacare,” Michael Gerson of the Washington Post observes. “It engaged in a regulatory power grab to ensure that it could implement Obamacare.” So here’s the deal. “The largest tax law and social policy change in a generation will be imposed on a skeptical public by a government agency whose credibility is in ruins.”

Bonne chance with that trip to Lourdes.