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Huizenga questions if IRS targeted adoptive families after reported audits
MLive - Zane McMillin - June 18, 2013 at 3:41 PM

GRAND RAPIDS, MI — U.S. Rep. Bill Huizenga this week joined 34 colleagues in urging the Internal Revenue Service to investigate whether adoptive families were improperly targeted by the agency last year.
In a letter dated Monday, June 17, Huizenga and his cosignatories implore the agency's top brass to review the findings of a recent Taxpayer Advocate Service report that 69 percent of those who applied for the federal adoption tax credit were audited.

Huizenga related that finding to the IRS' widely publicized targeting of conservative, liberal and other groups seeking tax-exempt status.

His letter was cosigned by the likes of Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., Peter King, R-N.Y., and fellow Michigan lawmakers Kerry Bentivolio, Dan Benishek and Tim Walberg.

"Right now the federal government, especially the IRS, is suffering from a trust deficit," Huizenga said in a statement. "A full examination of the auditing practices of the IRS relative to the adoption child tax credit is warranted."

The Taxpayer Advocate Service is an independent arm of the IRS that works on behalf of taxpayers. Its 2012 report, published in May, found adoptive families were overwhelmingly audited.
With nearly 70 percent of families who claimed the adoption tax credit that year, only 1.5 percent were found to have improperly applied it, the report found.

That phenomenon likely was rooted, media reports have since noted, in the fact that recent changes to how much families may claim led to the IRS' heightened scrutiny.

Provisions of the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare," boosted the adoption credit's maximum to just shy of $13,200, according to USA Today.

Tax experts and adoption advocates told the newspaper the IRS likely audited families because the credit can boost a tax refund by thousands of dollars.

"Yes, they had to wait," an Illinois-based tax preparer told USA Today last month. "But you are also talking about a lot of money."