Education

My coworker fought with the IRS for years to get a FICA exemption reinstated for her boss after she accidentally withheld FICA tax from his pay for a few years.

For all the years she argued with the IRS, he (and his employer) had to continue paying FICA. After years of calling and writing and waiting she finally found somebody who said where the necessary paperwork would be. But that person couldn't actually request it, instead she had to open another request with another office and argue that she should be allowed to request and obtain a search for this particular record. That office was a couple of floors lower in the same IRS building. Many months later she finally had the form to fill out to request the paperwork that the IRS had all along. After nearly 4 years of wrestling with the IRS, she got a copy of the paperwork certifying that her boss was exempt from FICA. She made a copy and mailed it back, certified, to the same building it had been mailed to her from, but a couple of floors above. She spent another few months re-explaining to another IRS worker why, exactly, she'd filed that form, got paperwork to request reimbursement of an overpayment of taxes, explained again why the taxes were overpaid, and waited for that person's supervisor to get his supervisor to review the file before issuing a check and closing that case.

Her boss, months later, got a check for around $25k that had been improperly withheld.

A few months later the bookkeeper got a threatening notice from the IRS that FICA taxes had not been withheld from her boss' paycheck for the previous 10 years and there was a penalty being levied in addition to interest and back taxes, with a notice to reply by a certain date to avoid legal action and garnishing of wages. I swear, that poor woman nearly cried. She told her boss who just stared, shook his head, gave her the rest of the day off, and walked away, still shaking his head.

No vulture capitalism. No privatization. It's a feature of a large, mindless, brainless bureaucracy, and they can be private or public, capitalist or socialist, 1st world or 3rd world.