Ve Have Vays Of Making You Pay

From The Daily Caller, Gautham Nagesh reporting, we learn:

Individuals who don’t purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency’s options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don’t comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, Shulman downplayed the IRS’s role in enforcing the recent overhaul of the health insurance industry by claiming the agency would not aggressively target individuals who don’t purchase coverage. He noted that the health-care bill expressly forbids the agency from freezing bank accounts, seizing assets or pursuing criminal charges, but when pressed said the IRS would most likely use tax refund offsets to penalize those that don’t comply with the mandate. The IRS uses refund offsets to collect from individuals that owe the federal government a delinquent debt.

“These are not the kinds of things we send agents out about,” Shulman said. “These are things where you get a letter from us. Congress was very careful to make sure there was nothing too punitive in this bill.”

Taking someone’s hard-earned money seems quite punitive to me, especially in these dreary economic times.

Tip of the fedora to DaTechguy, who comments:

I’d just LOVE to be the congressman who has to defend attaching people’s refunds, the young who this will hit the hardest will be positively thrilled!

If they even notice between beer sips and episodes of The Kardasians.  I hope, like DTG, that this will awaken some of the young to what’s going on, but, as always, I never, ever, get my hopes up too high.

In the same posting, DTG offers some good advice for us taxpayers:

This is one more reason to adjust your withholding. Once you do so take that money and put it in a CD that matures around April 15th of next year. Instead of hoping to see your refund let the government wait for your money.

And you get the interest too!

I’m going to talk to Mrs. B. about this idea.

SIDENOTE: Remember when the largest tyrannical governmental organization was the IRS?  How they were our biggest fear?  Now they seem, relatively speaking, like pussycats compared to, oh, say, the EPA, the Congress, and The Oval Office.

…And you knew where you stood then
Girls were girls and men were men
Mister, we could use a bad guy like the IRS again
Didn’t need no health mandates
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee, our old HMO ran great
Those were the days