WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The program was established in 2010 to enable low-income families to use their tax refund to buy paper savings bonds.
"The Department of the Treasury's elimination of paper savings bonds made buying bonds more difficult for some customers," the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, published on Monday, admitted.
The Treasury Department eliminated paper savings bonds in January 2012, after a long-term decline in savings bond purchases, according to the GAO.
However, this meant that customers from lower-income households without Internet access or their own bank accounts would have difficulty buying any savings bonds, the GAO said.
"A little more than one-third of the users of Treasury's Tax Time Savings Bond program — the only way to purchase paper bonds — were lower-income tax filers [filers with an adjusted gross income of $25,000 or less]."
For the four tax years 2010 through 2013, about 142,000 tax filers — less than 1 percent of tax filers receiving refunds — used at least part of their tax refund to buy nearly $72.5 million in savings bonds, the GAO noted.
"Of these filers, about 55,000 had incomes of $25,000 or less and bought about $13.7 million in savings bonds, or about $250, on average, per filer each year."
The US Government Accountability Office is an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress and investigates how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars.
