- November 23, 2024
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+ ‘Get real’: Publish names and businesses in Cops Corner
Dear Editor:
Recent complaints have been published about the Cops Corner column’s truly irritating policy of not naming persons or businesses. This is public information, and as mentioned by the Palm Coast Observer, can be obtained by anyone by going to the sheriff’s website. But why can’t The Observer provide the convenience of printing that information?
Mentioning “100 block of Cypress Point Parkway” does not protect Walmart’s identity, but only serves to make the column appear foolish by using seemingly important-sounding euphemisms.
And this is such a blatantly hypocritical policy when The Observer publishes all the names and businesses in its news sections. What are you thinking? You are a newspaper. Get real.
I enjoy reading The Observer, but the Cops Corner makes me feel that you consider me incompetent to have all the facts.
James Wallace
Palm Coast
+ Government intervention got us into this housing mess
Dear Editor:
Frank Zedar stated in last week’s letters to the editor that he is “truly mystified by this government intervention.” Well, the government’s intervention with the revision of the Community Investment Act is what made such a horrible mess of things in the first place. This revised act literally forced banks to make loans to individuals that they could never pay them back! The government blamed Wall Street and banks, but they perpetuated the schemes that almost brought down the country.
The government got away with it because much of the media refused to report the facts.
Our country is in so much debt that it is almost impossible to bail ourselves out! And we have a Congress that is dismantling Social Security by intervening with payments to the system to keep it afloat.
This Congress has failed to do what is right for the country because it is so selfish and only wants power for itself; they have no intention of doing what is needed to get our country back on track. I sure hope all you Floridians think very hard about who you vote for in the next election. And you all better vote because you can bet that those getting everything for free will be there to vote.
Tom McMullin
Palm Coast
+ Tax fraud case still unresolved a year later
Dear Editor:
Your article on tax fraud in last Wednesday’s edition of the Palm Coast Observer was most interesting. I had no idea how many people were being affected by this problem. I felt that my wife and I were a rare case.
Last year I did our taxes with TurboTax and attempted to file them electronically. However, when I tried to submit them, they were not accepted, and I found that there had already been a return with my Social Security number filed weeks before.
The IRS referred me to their Identity Protection Specialized Unit, which instructed me to print and mail them our tax return along with a Form 14039. And, instead of mailing it to Atlanta as I had done for years, I was to mail it to Kansas City because that is where the erroneous return had been filed. They also said it could be August before we received our refund of more than $3,500. They said it would be fruitless to file a report with our Sheriff’s Office, since the fraud occurred in Kansas City.
After patiently waiting an extra couple of months, we finally called the IRS in October and found that, not only was our refund not in the works yet, they hadn’t even had time to process our claim.
In November, we received a letter from them giving us a contact name and phone, stating that we would be provided with an update by Dec. 3, 2011. We heard nothing during December, so in January we called our contact and got a machine message stating he would get back to us. On Jan. 24, 2012, we received another letter stating: “We haven’t yet resolved this matter because we haven’t completed all the research necessary for a complete response.” They also said they would provide us an update on our inquiry by Feb. 22, 2012. We’ll see!
It has been almost a year, and I’m wondering how I will handle this year’s filing. At any rate, I was somewhat relieved to see that we were not alone in this problem.
As the saying goes, misery loves company. Thanks for the informative article.
Ronald Berceli
Palm Coast
