Thursday, October 21, 2010

IRS, FSA , and Adjusted Gross II

Still dealing with PC problems, but I need to get back to this subject. Here's the Iowa State's pdf paper
and a paragraph from it:
In the fall of 2010, FSA offices received a list of people who the IRS claimed did not send in their CCC 927 forms to Fresno. Those farmers then began receiving official notices of the delinquency in the mail. It is believed that the problem involves the unfamiliarity of the IRS with the CCC forms. The IRS has been notified of the issue and is being further advised as to the nature of Form CCC 927 and how it is to be processed.
In my hurried reading earlier, I was confused by this.   Rereading and reading between the lines here's what I understand:
  • some farmers participating in the program sent their CCC-927 forms, authorizing IRS to tell FSA whether their AGI was above the limit, to IRS in Fresno
  • since this was the first time for the process, some IRS people in Fresno didn't know what the forms were and what to do with them (probably particularly in the case of misaddressed forms)
  • some farmers who were supposed to send in their forms didn't
  • FSA presumably gave IRS a list of tax ID's of program participants who should have supplied CCC-927's.
  • IRS matched the list from FSA against their list of CCC-927's received.  They gave FSA a list of ID's for which they hadn't recorded a CCC-927, either because it got lost, was misprocessed, or was never sent.
  • FSA broke the list down by county and sent it out.  (Maybe I missed it, but I would have expected a PL notice to have gone out as well. So for this and the next steps, I'm relying on Iowa State.)
  • The FSA county offices notified their program participants that no CCC-927 was recorded, meaning eligibility for payments was in question.
That's as far as I'd go without seeing FSA procedure.  These sorts of matching efforts between bureaucracies are difficult to work through. If the producer knows she mailed the form, she's going to be mad, and scared about maybe losing her payments, or at least going through a lot of hassle.  If he didn't mail the form, he's maybe going to lie and say he did, because who's to know.  Either way the poor person at the counter in the county office is going to take some heat.  Eventually, after some time, the systems will get worked out and expectations established, but not this fall.

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