The IRS “mistakenly” put a levy on Christine O’Donnell’s bank accounts

  Shortly after Christine O’Donnell announced her candidacy for the Senate an IRS employee illegally accessed her tax returns and slapped a lien on a house which supposedly belonged to her.

  In addition to illegally accessing her tax returns there was another problem with this–she no longer owned the house the IRS put a lien on.

  The IRS chalked this up as a “computer glitch,” the lien was removed, and her name was cleared. That should have been the end of this story but apparently it is not because now the IRS is at it again.

  This time the IRS put a levy on her bank accounts and stole $30,000 because–they claim–she owed it in taxes for selling a house.

  Here is more:

Adding to the long-running saga of IRS dealings with conservatives, former Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell says the tax agency punished her mistakenly for the second time in five years by imposing an erroneous levy on her bank accounts.

Ms. O’Donnell told The Washington Times that she discovered the levy when she couldn’t access her checking account as she was preparing to visit relatives over Thanksgiving.

“The day before I was heading out of town for the Thanksgiving weekend, my bank told me the IRS had frozen my accounts. They didn’t give me a reason why, just a phone number to call,” Ms. O’Donnell said in an interview this week.

She said she called the Internal Revenue Service and was told the agency had concluded she owed $30,000 in taxes from a 2008 house transaction, which was long ago accounted for on her federal returns. She said she implored the agency to check her tax records and eventually was told the levy was generated in error and her accounts would be freed up.

Although IRS officials removed the levy, they first withdrew all the funds from her account. They said that, too, was in error and the funds would be returned to her. The funds have not been replaced, Ms. O’Donnell said.

  The IRS admitted its “mistake” and promised to reimburse her although they have not to this point, it seems they were in much more of a hurry to take her money than they are in returning it.

  So, was this intentional or is the IRS really this incompetent? And which would be worse?