When was the last time you saw hundreds of millions of dollars given back to the government from business owners who felt they might have received that money in some error?
Well, now you can say you witnessed that as it was announced by the AP yesterday April 2nd that the IRS has received $225 million from a voluntary disclosure program regarding the Employee Retention Tax Credit. The disclosure program allowed the business owner to keep 20%.
The ERTC was essentially a grant program designed to help businesses recover costs for retaining employees during pandemic-era shutdowns, however, it was inundated with fraud. Not sure it was much of a surprise given it was on the heels of the massive fraud for other Covid-era programs such as the Paycheck Protection Program.
Another $251 millions in claims was voluntarily withdrawn because those business owners feared the consequences of an improper filing or credit. This is a shocking amount when you consider the cooperation from taxpayers and whether they knew errors or fraud were responsible for the credit they either received or were in the process of possibly doing so.
The program has been paused for months while the IRS investigates everything. They say they will reopen the ERTC program at some point. "The IRS has assessed $572 million in audits of more than 12,000 businesses that filed over 22,000 improper claims", according to the AP article.
great article