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Washington, D.C.—A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report to Congress confirming skyrocketing consumer complaints against debt collectors should make the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) abandon its plan to turn over the personal and sensitive information of taxpayers to this most complained-about industry in America, the leader of the union representing IRS employees said today.

The most telling point in the FTC report, said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), is that the FTC itself believes “that the more than 58,000 consumers who complained last year is only a relatively small percentage of people who have problems with debt collectors. Most people simply do not tell the FTC.”

“I can’t imagine a more telling statement pointing to the folly of the IRS plan,” Kelley said.

NTEU has been leading the fight against IRS plans to hire private debt collectors to go after tax debts in return for a bounty on the money they collect. An IRS study showed that with a modest increase in enforcement resources, IRS employees could collect literally ten times as much revenue for every dollar invested.

According to the FTC annual report to Congress on the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, third-party debt collectors generated 58,687 consumer complaints to the FTC last year—fully 17 percent of all complaints filed with the FTC last year, and a sharp increase from the year before in both the absolute number of such complaints and as a percentage of all consumer complaints to the FTC.

President Kelley repeatedly has argued that privatizing tax collection clearly will open taxpayers to abuses of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act—as occurred in 1996 when the IRS previously tried a similar program, which performed so badly that a planned follow-up the next year was cancelled—as well as put their personal information, including their Social Security numbers, at serious risk.

NTEU is pressing for passage of H.R. 1621, a bill introduced in the House of Representatives by Reps. Rob Simmons (R-CT) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) that would revoke the IRS’s authority to hire private debt collectors. A number of public interest groups, particularly those representing lower-income taxpayers and minorities, also have weighed in against the program.

To view the FTC report, visit http://ftc.gov/reports/fdcpa05/050729fdcparpt.pdf.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.