I used to work in taxes. Heard and seen so much that almost nothing surprises me about taxes any more. I heard an IRS auditor telling stories once about his experiences in dealing with people. When they started requiring a social security number to claim someone as a dependent; it seems that thousands and thousands of dependents nationwide disappeared from tax returns in that one year.

Before that when they tried to verify dependents by doing a home visits they often had more than one appointment in apartments and housing complexes and they found that many of the kids looked very familiar. They determined that the word had gotten around about the upcoming IRS visits and the kids from the first stop would leave out the back way and run to the next stop allowing the people there to have the necessary number of kids to prove their dependents.

It always rubbed me the wrong way to have a large single mother come in to have her taxes filed and find out that she might have worked very little and her only concern was how much she was going to get back. She had probably paid nothing and in some cases was getting thousands of dollars back. Our tax dollars at work creating whole generations of people who do not want to work.