News about stimulus cash \u201cmistakenly\u201d being\ndispensed to non-resident aliens is another black eye for a shadowy foreign\nstudent work program that\u2019s costing America billions of dollars a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Politico<\/a> reports that the Internal Revenue Service improperly distributed payments to thousands of foreigners in April. The error stems from a common tax-filing blunder by those on F-1 student and J-1 exchange visas. These workers, studying at universities and working summer jobs, often use TurboTax and other e-filing tools without knowing that the systems are designed only for U.S. residents. In its haste to send checks out, the IRS just waved them through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though the IRS has not said how much money it\nincorrectly disbursed, a survey of more than <\/strong>500 schools last\nweek found that <\/strong>43 percent <\/strong>had\nforeign students who believed they received a payment in error. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c[The students] don\u2019t think they\u2019ll necessarily\never be caught or they don\u2019t think there\u2019s really that big a problem,\u201d Donna\nKepley, president of the tax firm Arctic International Kepley, told Politico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A record 1.1 million foreign students were in the U.S. last year, according to the Institute of International Education<\/a>. In addition, the government granted nearly 400,000 J-1 visas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Growing right along with these numbers is the Optional Practical Training<\/a> (OPT) program for foreign students, some of whom use it to extend their stay in this country after leaving school. Over the past 20 years, OPT has metastasized into the largest guest worker program in the U.S., despite numerous findings of fraud, FAIR<\/a> noted last month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not\nonly is there no limit on how many foreign students and ex-students can be\nhired through OPT, there is scant oversight of the program and fewer worker\nprotections than with H-1B work visas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n OPT is particularly odious in\nhow it disadvantages American workers. Employers of\nOPT-enrolled aliens do not pay payroll taxes for the Social Security and\nMedicare trust funds for those workers. This saves those employers 8.25 percent\non the wages to OPT participants, while excusing the aliens from paying these\ndeductions as well, costing the two trust funds more than $2 billion a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is an absurd inequity when more than 30 million Americans are jobless, the highest level since the Great Depression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n