As millions of Americans struggle, the IRS builds a "visionary," oversized and green palace for bureaucrats in Boston

The $92 million renovations at the IRS compound in Andover will include a reflecting pool, an art gallery, indoor gardens, a 7,000-square-foot cafeteria and an amphitheater, but it remains unclear what new permanent jobs, if any, will come to the center.

The Herald reported last month that the IRS received $80.5 million in stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for “green upgrades” to the 400,000-square-foot complex.

The IRS already had $11.4 million on hand for the work. During a tour of the 50-year-old federal complex Thursday, the architect called the project “visionary” and said the building “will be relevant 50 years from now.”

IRS spokeswoman Peggy Riley said in an e-mail that “nothing has changed” since April, when she said it was premature to say whether permanent jobs would come to Andover once construction is complete in August 2012.

Architect Jonathan Levi, whose firm received $8.3 million to design the renovations, said planners have taken that uncertainty into account by designing “flexible” workspace with movable partitions that could be rearranged for a variety of activities.

“It will be a comfortable, collaborative environment” that would foster “community and belonging,” Levi said. “It will be welcoming for the people who use it.”

Levi said the upgraded building will have have room for 2,000 employees, more than double the 900 that work there. About 1,400 employees were laid off last year because an increase in electronic tax submissions meant fewer workers are needed to process paper returns. The remaining employees serve primarily in customer service at the IRS call center.

Last month, critics blasted the project as a “boondoggle,” saying the $92 million would have been better spent fixing roads, bridges and dams. Supporters said renovating the site would be an incentive for bringing permanent jobs there.

Officials from the U.S. General Services Administration, the federal agency that channeled stimulus money to the IRS, said in a statement the Andover site was chosen to “put people back to work quickly” and transform “federal buildings into high-performance green buildings.”

Your free and easy postings on Facebook and MySpace may titillate, but they also may inform

From The Wall Street Journal

"Tax deadbeats are finding someone actually reads their MySpace and Facebook postings: the taxman.

State revenue agents have begun nabbing scofflaws by mining information posted on social-networking Web sites, from relocation announcements to professional profiles to financial boasts.

In Minnesota, authorities were able to levy back taxes on the wages of a long-sought tax evader after he announced on MySpace that he would be returning to his home town to work as a real-estate broker and gave his employer's name. The state collected several thousand dollars, the full amount due."

D.C. court: IRS screwed taxpayers out of billions

"In a blistering 2-1 opinion, the D.C. Circuit today reinstated a challenge to the IRS's procedures for issuing billions of dollars of refunds of the long distance telephone excise tax. Cohen v. Commissioner, No. 08-5088 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 7, 2009). Here is the opening of the majority's opinion:

The opinion:

"Comic-strip writer Bob Thaves famously quipped, 'A fool and his money are soon parted. It takes creative tax laws for the rest.' In this case it took the Internal Revenue Service’s (“IRS” or “the Service”) aggressive interpretation of the tax code to part millions of Americans with billions of dollars in excise tax collections. Even this remarkable feat did not end the IRS’s creativity. When it finally conceded defeat on the legal front, the IRS got really inventive and developed a refund scheme under which almost half the funds remained unclaimed."

IRS audit results in Henry Louis Gates-gate

"A charity headed by star Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is filing an amended 2007 report to the Internal Revenue Service because $11,000 it paid to foundation officers as compensation was mischaracterized as being for research grants.

Questions about Inkwell Foundation emerged over the weekend, part of a tsunami of attention Gates has received since July 16, when he was arrested at his home by a police officer responding to a report about a possible burglary in progress. The incident ignited a national debate over racial profiling, further magnified when President Obama jumped into it."

http://www.propublica.org/