We were chatting on the phone, each in our own homes, when a friend who is a federal agent said that a lot of law enforcement people (all confined to work at home) had some time on their hands, government-paid time.
"Think about what we do day after day," he said; "We go to the office, we meet with colleagues, we interview people on the street, we seek indictments from grand juries, we attend court sessions," he continued "but we cannot do that any more, and we cannot do that from home, so some of us have time on our hands. It's a good occasion to give us tips to investigate."
Earlier I wrote about a similarly under-used resource, CBP inspectors stationed at ports of entry with little traffic to monitor because the ports are all but closed.
Quite separately I have noted several times that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) routinely gives income tax refund checks to illegal aliens using Social Security numbers that were not issued to those aliens; SSNs in many cases that were validly issued to someone else and then sold on the street or, in a few cases, invented numbers never issued to anyone. I don't think the agency routinely checks names and SSNs on tax returns against the names to which the SSNs were issued.
Further, I strongly suspect that the IRS — never a friend of immigration enforcement — is sending out the current $1,200 relief checks without taking the extra step of making sure that the person getting the check is the person to whom the SSN was issued.
Then, albeit belatedly, it dawned on me: Why not use those paid and underutilized hours of skilled federal investigators and inspectors to help the IRS with the SSN confirmations? This clearly is work that can be done at home online.
We should not be sending illegal aliens checks; that just encourages them to stay in the country. We are about to go heavily into debt for disaster relief. Why not save money — billions, I am sure — by putting those feds to work in the safety of their homes on this project, all at no additional cost to the government?
Maybe readers can pass on this notion to their members of Congress who might, in turn, send it to the White House.
A phone call from the White House to the IRS along these lines would save the United States billions of dollars. Will such a call be made?