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Saturday, May 4, 2002 ❑ Santa Monica Daily Press
COMICS Natural Selection® By Russ Wallace
Speed Bump®
Reality Check® By Dave Whammond
By Dave Coverly
NEWS OF THE WEIRD by Chuck Shepard
IRS pays $30M in refunds to ‘slavery reparation’ claims IRS admitted to a Washington Post reporter in April that it had paid out $30 million in fraudulent refunds in the last two years to black taxpayers claiming (at about $40,000 each) the nonexistent slavery reparations credit (and 12 of those were IRS employees). (However, IRS did catch $2.4 billion of slavery claims before refunds went out.) And the agency filed formal charges against at least two accountants who have been advising clients to use "Section 861" of the tax code to claim (preposterously, according to every court that has heard the claim) that income tax only applies to Americans who work for foreign companies. (That scam reached prominence in March when the agency revealed that actor Wesley Snipes had asked IRS to refund the $7.3 million he paid in 1997 taxes, citing Section 861.)