Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by laken 2032 days ago
Some people in the article either have no ties to the US at all or have renounced US citizenship, so it _will not_ be corrected next year as they don't file tax returns.

Regardless, this is chump change to the US government, and there are other larger lost amounts of money they should probably worry about anyway.

2 comments

If you owe money to the IRS, you need to file a tax return whether you're a US citizen or not.

Now you might say, well what is the US gonna do if you don't?

Well, the people mentioned in the article receive Social Security (so "no ties to the US at all" is false), and you can 100% expect their SS checks to be garnished to cover debt to the IRS, as this happens all the time with unpaid back taxes.

So it's not going to be any free money at the end of the day.

The whole process would obviously take a few years, but literally all the systems are already in place for it. Nothing special even needs to be done. It'll just happen.

The two people mentioned in the article still have ties to the US because they receive social security payments.
The unmentioned reality is that tying these payments to SS payouts helped millions of people - the ones who are least able to navigate complex government systems.