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Washington, D.C.—Seventeen Republican members of the House of Representatives have urged their leaders, including Speaker Dennis Hastert, to stand firm in the House’s opposition to the use of private debt collection companies to collect tax debts.

The letter is a follow-up to a similar letter to Republican leaders last fall, signed by 14 Republican House members, emphasizing their opposition to any such plan.

“I’m encouraged that so many members are willing to come forward to stress their opposition to contracting out tax collections,” said National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) President Colleen M. Kelley. She has been leading the fight against administration efforts to contract out tax collection. .

In their letter to Speaker Hastert, the 17 House Republicans objected to a provision of H.R. 4520, a corporate tax bill which was introduced last Friday and which is scheduled to be voted on by the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday. A similar provision was stripped out of the corporate tax bill after the previous letter of opposition; however, the Senate-approved version of the legislation includes a five-year pilot project of private tax debt collection.

The House members were firm in their opposition to the proposal, which would allow private debt collectors to pocket 25 percent of the money they collect.

“In this era of electronic information, instantaneous communication and rampant ‘identity theft,’” they wrote, “we have grave concerns about the release of sensitive personal information to entities and individuals.”

They added: “The concept of allowing this information to be shared with non-governmental third parties is fraught with peril. Agreeing to the Senate provision would establish a very bad precedent in allowing one of the core functions of the federal government to be outsourced to a non-governmental third party, including entities outside the United States.”

In emphasizing that tax collection clearly is an inherently governmental function, President Kelley noted that a pilot program by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) less than a decade ago showed such poor results and generated so many taxpayer complaints about the actions of debt collectors that a planned follow-up program was cancelled.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 29 agencies and departments, including some 98,000 in the IRS.