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Washington, D.C.—Even as a government report details wide-ranging deficiencies with Internal Revenue Service controls over tax payments and taxpayer information —including oversight of its contractors—the agency is unwisely moving ahead with its plan to privatize the collection of tax debts, the leader of the union representing IRS employees said today.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) cited the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report as “still further evidence” that the IRS privatization plan will put at serious risk personal and sensitive taxpayer information and should be shelved.

She called on Congress to approve pending legislation (H.R. 1621) advanced by Reps. Rob Simmons (R-CT) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) that would revoke the authority of the IRS to hire private debt collection companies, which would earn a bounty of up to 25 percent of the money they collect.

The IRS, which plans full implementation of the program early next year, has issued a request for quotation—a form of a bid for work on the privatization program—from companies on a General Services Administration (GSA) list of vendors.

The most recent GAO report (GAO-05-247R) cited a number of internal control problems and follows on the heels of an earlier GAO report (GAO-05-482) which was also critical of the IRS’s capacity to secure taxpayer information.

The agency’s inability to secure such data is worrisome, Kelley said, noting that this failure in connection with contractors is particularly troubling.

In its most recent report, GAO pointed out that at three IRS facilities it visited, some contractors who had either not undergone background investigations or for whom background investigation requests hadn’t even been submitted were granted “staff-like access to restricted areas.” It is in restricted areas that taxpayer records and personal financial information is kept and, according to GAO, some contract employees had this access for several years. IRS policy is supposed to prohibit access to restricted areas to only those contractors who have successfully completed required background investigations.

NTEU has been leading the fight against administration efforts to contract an increasing number of federal jobs to private sector companies. The union has been particularly vocal about the IRS plan to privatize tax collection—an idea that is generating a growing amount of bipartisan political opposition.

“The IRS’s history of contractor oversight is nothing less than terrible,” the NTEU leader said. The GAO report about faulty internal controls “serves as a serious and direct warning” about the dangers to taxpayer privacy inherent in the privatization plan, she added.

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