To: Qualified Opinion who wrote (13097 ) 12/27/2014 9:58:32 AM From: joseffy Respond to IRS mistakenly penalizes Christine O’Donnell a second time, placed levy on bank accounts John Solomon - The Washington Times - Thursday, December 25, 2014 former Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell says the tax agency punished her mistakenly for the second time in five years by imposing an erroneous levy on her bank accounts. “The day before I was heading out of town for the Thanksgiving weekend, my bank told me the IRS had frozen my accounts. They didn’t give me a reason why, just a phone number to call,” Ms. O’Donnell said in an interview this week.She said she called the Internal Revenue Service and was told the agency had concluded she owed $30,000 in taxes from a 2008 house transaction, which was long ago accounted for on her federal returns. She said she implored the agency to check her tax records and eventually was told the levy was generated in error and her accounts would be freed up. Although IRS officials removed the levy, they first withdrew all the funds from her account. They said that, too, was in error and the funds would be returned to her. The funds have not been replaced, Ms. O’Donnell said. “They said it was a mistake, and they removed the levy. I’m grateful, but I also wonder what someone with less government experience might do when they find themselves frozen from their money because the IRS got its paperwork mixed up. It can be scary. You feel helpless if you can’t even buy gas for your car,” she said.Delaware state authorities accessed Ms. O’Donnell’s IRS tax file on a Saturday morning in spring 2010, right around the time she announced her candidacy and a story was leaked alleging that she owed back taxes to the IRS, which was later proved to be false. The first tax lien was placed on a house she had sold more than two years earlier, and it created headaches for her finances and her campaign. The lien was highly publicized and used to discredit Ms. O’Donnell’s candidacy just as it was getting off the ground, even though she no longer owned the home in question.The IRS eventually removed the lien, blaming it on a computer error. Ms . O’Donnell sold the home in 2008, and financial documents from her lender show that her back payments were satisfied in July 2008, long before the IRS initiated the bogus lien. friends and family also were subjected to intrusive audits, though they were cleared. She believes the first round of IRS intrusions were political and malicious, and she has called on Congress to rein in the tax agency.The second erroneous tax lien was revealed the same week that House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, California Republican, released a report highlighting emails he said showed a clear anti-conservative bias inside the IRS. It was also the same week that the House Ways and Means and Senate Judiciary committees confirmed they were still investigating the 2010 breach of Ms. O’Donnell’s tax records.washingtontimes.com
