News/Commentary

American hostages told to fork over overdue tax bills to IRS upon return to U.S.

October 1, 2024 | | Print Article

Three American hostages who were held in Russian hellholes returned to the United States only to be confronted by the IRS.

“That’s the bizarre situation in which hostages Evan Gerskovich, Paul Whelan, and Vladimir Kara-Murza found themselves after they were released from detention in Russia last month. All three men say they faced a battery of surprise financial issues after returning home, including tax charges and hits to the credit stemming from bills they were unable to pay while behind bars,” Reason reported.

These weren’t the first hostages to be “welcomed” back to the U.S. with a tax bill.

“I got one of those bills from the IRS saying, you owe this much on this year, you owe this much on this year because of failure to pay on time—here’s the interest that’s accrued,” Washington Post reporter and former hostage Jason Rezaian recounted to NPR in an interview. “This is an oversight that nobody really thought about.”

Rezaian was slapped with over $6,000 in fees for unpaid taxes after his release. He was imprisoned for 544 days in Iran.

“Adding layers of bureaucratic red tape on top of what you’ve just been through, it feels like a new series of impediments when all you want to do is run, right? You want to move forward. You want to make up for the time that you’ve missed,” Rezaian said.

Currently, according to NPR, there are somewhere between 40 and 60 American hostages that are being illegally detained by various nations. If and when they return home, they will face similar gifts from the IRS. It’s bad enough to be imprisoned by our enemies abroad but to be slammed by the IRS after being freed is just adding insult to injury.

“The IRS, for its own part, claims that it doesn’t have the legal authority to remove tax fees for returning hostages. However, that could change. Earlier this year, Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) introduced the Stop Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, an aptly named bill that would require the IRS to exempt hostages from tax liability during the period of their detainment. The bill would also force the IRS to allow hostages and their spouses to apply to have their tax-related fines removed,” Reason noted.

“If Coons’ bill passes, it would solve a small but frustrating problem in our robotic tax system. It’s a no-brainer that someone illegally detained abroad can’t pay their Netflix subscription on time—much less their taxes. In addition to dealing with the horrors of being held hostage in a foreign country and dealing with the rocky transition back to normal life, former detainees shouldn’t also get slapped with thousands of dollars of fines for taxes they never could have paid in the first place,” the media outlet added.

“The State Department provides the IRS with a list of people who have been taken hostage in a terrorist act, and advises the agency to ‘suspend enforcement related notices and collection activity on existing accounts,'” Reason noted.

If that is the case, why isn’t it standard policy to do that when hostages return home? Penalizing hostages is a disgrace and it needs to be rectified.

Users sounded off on the obscene actions of the IRS:

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