Unauthorized Workers Contributed $100B In Payroll Taxes To The Social Security Trust Fund And The IRS Suspended Account

Undocumented or unauthorized workers in the U.S. have contributed about $100B to the Social Security Trust Fund in the last decade and when unauthorized workers fail to file tax refunds, those unclaimed tax refund dollars get deposited into the IRS suspended account as a tax revenue surplus.

By H. Nelson Goodson
Hispanic News Network U.S.A.

August 16, 2015

Washington, D.C. - In 2014, Stephen Goss, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration told Vice News that in the last decade, an estimated 11M undocumented immigrants reside in the U.S. and about 7M are unauthorized workers and 3.1M of those worked with fake or expired Social Security numbers and paid automatic payroll taxes to the federal government. In 2010, a $13B annual net contribution was made to the Social Security Trust Fund.
In the last ten years, unauthorized workers have paid an estimated $100B into the trust fund and most of the unauthorized workers will never benefit from their tax contributions later in life, according to Goss.
Most of the payroll tax funds collected from unauthorized workers are not claimed at the end of the year because they fail to file a tax refund with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS transfers unclaimed tax refunds to a suspended account totalling billions of dollars.
Also, State Tax Revenue Departments around the country have seen a surplus of state generated payroll tax revenue from unauthorized workers, but state governments have failed to report revenue earnings to its constituency including state unclaimed tax refunds generated by unauthorized workers.

The Immigration Policy Center reported that a study by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) showed undocumented immigrants who were the main income wage earners and head of households did in fact paid their fair share of state and local taxes in 2010.
In 2010, the ITEP study showed that undocumented immigrants paid $8.4 billion in sales taxes, $1.6 billion in property taxes, and $1.2 billion in personal income taxes. (ITEP study http://tinyurl.com/illegalsPayTaxes). States that gained the most revenue from undocumented immigrants (UI's) paying taxes were California ($2.7 billion), Texas ($1.6 billion), Florida ($807 million), New York ($662 million), and Illinois ($499 million). They were followed by Georgia ($456 million), New Jersey ($446 million), Arizona ($433 million), and in Wisconsin ($94.4 million).
In Wisconsin, UI's paid $21,7 million in personal income, $6.1 million in property taxes and $66.5 million in sale taxes in 2010 totaling $94.4M, according to the ITEP study.

Video: Unauthorized workers paid $100B of payroll taxes into the Social Security Trust Fund https://youtu.be/E2q9s7ZmFHw