From the government body that brought you Tea Party Takedown and Lois Lerner Lies comes yet another scandal that illustrates the sheer incompetence and corruption of our unaccountable government.
$67 million allocated to an IRS slush fund for the purpose of rolling out Obamacare is unaccounted for, according to a report issued by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
When the Affordable Care Act was adopted in 2010, it included a provision to establish a $1 billion Health Insurance Reform Implementation Fund “to pay for the Federal administrative expenses to carry out the ACA”—yet another joyous discovery about the bill that passed “so that you can find out what is in it.”
So far, the IRS has been allocated $488 million from the HIRIF to help the agency prepare for the “law’s numerous tax provisions.” The audit was performed to determine whether the IRS had used the funds appropriately to create an “adequate process to accurately account for and report selected ACA implementation costs charged to the HIRIF.”
The report—released just two weeks before the launch of Obamacare Exchanges—reveals that Obamacare finances are already in ruins. Take a look:
Affordable Care Act: Tracking of Health Insurance Reform Implementation Fund Costs Could Be Improved
…The IRS did not track all costs associated with implementation of the ACA including costs not charged to the HIRIF. Specifically, the IRS did not account for or attempt to quantify approximately $67 million of indirect ACA costs incurred for Fiscal Years 2010 through 2012. Indirect costs include, for example, providing employees with workspace and information technology support.
The IRS established a methodology to track ACA costs in its accounting records. However, the IRS accounted for only direct costs, such as labor and contract costs, because it did not believe that indirect costs should be recovered from the HIRIF…
…By not also identifying and tracking indirect costs, the IRS lacks complete information regarding the full cost of ACA implementation. This lack of complete information on ACA implementation costs limits the IRS’s ability to accurately report to stakeholders the total resources it applied to the ACA implementation and fully estimate the resources needed in the future for this effort.
This is just the beginning. If the IRS managed to mishandle $67 million during the preparation process, what’s going to happen when the agency is responsible for overseeing the new Obamacare tax regulations that affect every American citizen?
The political targeting of charity groups by supposedly ‘non-partisan,’ IRS officials was hard enough to stomach, but the idea that these same officials are going to be in charge of financing national health care services is nothing short of a recipe for disaster.
The missing $67 million is going to be pocket-change in comparison to how much Obamacare will cost in the long run. But in this economy, most Americans can’t spare their pocket change, let alone $67 million worth of taxed income.
Which begs the question, yet again: Who assumed the IRS was more capable than you to oversee your health finances?