IRS Audits Single Mom Making $20K, Says She Can't Claim Kids as Dependents
A single mom who makes about $20,000 a year working at a hair salon, Rachel Porcaro doesn’t own a car and lives with her parents in order to make ends meet.
But apparently not believing that she could pay her bills on her actual, reported income, the Internal Revenue Service has just put the 32-year-old mother of two through a one-year audit, reports the Seattle Times in a column written by Danny Westneat. The IRS told the columnist that it can’t tell its side of the story for taxpayer privacy reasons, so the article is based on information from Porcaro, her father and an accountant.
Porcaro says she pays her parents $400 a month rent for herself and her two sons, who are 10 and 8, so the IRS audited her parents, too.
With the help of an accountant retained by her father, she won a reversal of the government’s initial determination that she owed a $16,000 tax bill, although she and her parents racked up a $10,000 bill defending themselves. However, the IRS says Porcaro can’t claim her two sons as dependents on her tax return, because she can’t prove that she spent enough money supporting them.
“I tell you, we don’t buy a roll of toilet paper anymore without keeping the receipt,” her father, Rob Porcaro, tells the newspaper.
The accountant, Dante Driver of G.A. Michael and Co. in Seattle, confirms that an IRS auditor showed Rachel Porcaro a spreadsheet of Seattle incomes, telling her that the agency’s data proves that a family of three needs twice her income to get by in the city.
“They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something,” he says. “Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money.”
