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In February 2015, a rumor began to circulate claiming immigrants affected by ongoing immigration policy changes (announced in a November 2014 speech by President Obama) would receive amnesty bonuses of $24,000. According to the rumor, the bonus in question would be disbursed in the form of tax refunds issued to immigrants who had paid no income taxes in the first place. In essence, the rumor suggested, immigrants granted a path to citizenship could retroactively claim tax credits for wages they had earned without proper documentation and on which they had paid no taxes. Before the rumor circulated widely, an article published on 3 February 2015 addressed many of its tenets and clearly explained the tax breaks and benefits in question applied only to undocumented workers who had filed tax returns within the small window of the previous three years: By 13 February 2015, this claim had evolved to encompass tax refunds being given to undocumented immigrants even without their filing (or paying) any taxes: However, it was clear from the Internal Revenue Service's stated policy the claim was misleading at best. The oft-cited figure of $24,000 as an amnesty bonus, for instance, applied only to a small pool of people who earned sufficient income to qualify for that credit during the three years in which they did not have Social Security numbers. Second, the dollar amount mentioned was a theoretical maximum contingent upon the worker's qualifying for the highest possible Earned Income Tax Credit -- specifically, having at least three children, and having earned income within the specified limits of eligibility requirements: The number of immigrants who might have met the criteria for new citizenship policies and who therefore qualified to amend or submit their tax returns isn't known, but the federal government was not doling out any sort of bonus based on immigration status. The policy change in question simply allowed (among other things) immigrants who had since been granted Social Security numbers to amend or submit three years' worth of previously filed tax returns to receive EITC credits based on previously-earned wages if they were so qualified. Note that it is possible for any low-income taxpayer to have no tax liability (and thus pay no income tax) for a given year, yet still receive a refund by qualifying for the Earned Income Tax Credit. That condition is a facet of the U.S. tax system that has nothing to do with one's immigration status. On 3 June 2015, the web site Breitbart published an article titled IRS: Amnestied Illegals Don't Need to Have Filed Returns to Access Tax Credits for Illegal Work. That article linked to a set of five questions posed by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen following a February 2015 hearing about various aspects of that agency's operations. The second of those questions dealt with the subject of the EITC and deferred action: What Koskinen's clarification stated was that immigrants eligible under the amnesty program to claim EITC could do so by filing retroactive tax returns (i.e., submitting returns for years in which they had previously not filed at all) in addition to amending previous years' returns. But either way, claimants still had to first file tax returns in order to be eligible for EITC, and they must have shown a documented history of earned income in order to qualify (filers would have to reconstruct earnings and other records for years when they were not able to work on the books). Thus, although amnestied immigrants were eligible to retroactively amend and file tax documents in order to claim earned tax credits, they could do so only within the same framework that applied to all other taxpaying Americans (no further back than three years), and no exceptional flexibility in that regard was extended to them due to amnesty provisions introduced in November 2014.
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