The IRS hard at work

“A Tampa man reported an income of $18,497. The IRS sent him a refund check for $980,000.”

This was not a clerical error or a typo or a misplaced decimal point. He actually filed a tax return saying that a million had somehow been withheld from his paychecks, even though his gross income was less than $20,000, and the IRS system processed it unquestioningly.

Although the IRS eventually figured out that his claim could not be true, it’s amazing to me that there is nothing built into their computers that automatically raises a red flag and forces a human review if the withholding amount is greater than the amount of gross income.