Department of Stupid: Uncle Sam abusing taxpayers to claw back fiat

Don't take my fiat- please! Via the Washington Post:

Across the nation, hundreds of thousands of taxpayers who are expecting refunds this month are instead getting letters like the one Grice got, informing them that because of a debt they never knew about — often a debt incurred by their parents — the government has confiscated their check. The Treasury Department has intercepted $1.9 billion in tax refunds already this year — $75 million of that on debts delinquent for more than 10 years, said Jeffrey Schramek, assistant commissioner of the department’s debt management service. The aggressive effort to collect old debts started three years ago — the result of a single sentence tucked into the farm bill lifting the 10-year statute of limitations on old debts to Uncle Sam.

Since the drive to collect on very old debts began in 2011, the Treasury Department has collected $424 million in debts that were more than 10 years old. Those debts were owed to many federal agencies, but the one that has many Americans howling this tax season is the Social Security Administration, which has found 400,000 taxpayers who collectively owe $714 million on debts more than 10 years old. The agency expects to have begun proceedings against all of those people by this summer. 

This is about as cruel and pointless as government policy can get. Here we have federal agencies spending valuable time and resources to go after old grandmas and widows, for the useless purpose of clawing back fiat money!  The IRS is literally going back decades to find overpayments and mistakes, and automatically garnishing benefits/refunds from people who really need the spending power. 

Some of the IRS/Social Security admin tactics described in the article seem like what a private debt collector would do. Can the IRS be sued for a UDAP violation? This is a lose politically AND economically. I guess this is what happens when you try to "run government like a business."