Home Media Center News Releases

Washington, D.C.—The leader of the union representing Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees today urged the deficit reduction super committee to reject significant proposed congressional cuts to IRS funding and instead support the White House request for additional tax enforcement resources contained in President Obama’s deficit reduction plan.

“NTEU believes that at a time when Congress is debating painful choices of program cuts and tax increases to address the federal budget deficit, it makes no sense to eliminate one of the most painless and effective deficit reduction tools: collecting revenue that is owed, but hasn’t yet been paid,” President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) wrote in a letter to the 12 members of the committee.

“The important role that IRS plays in deficit reduction is clear. In fiscal 2011, the IRS collected $2.345 trillion in gross revenue to fund the federal government, approximately 93 percent of all federal receipts,” Kelley wrote.

The NTEU leader noted that fiscal 2012 appropriations bills approved by the House and Senate appropriations committees would drastically reduce IRS funding. The House measure would slash IRS funding by more than $600 million from current levels—and $1.8 billion less than the administration request. The Senate bill, meanwhile, calls for a cut of more than $450 million from fiscal 2011 levels, and that would be $1.6 billion less than the White House request.

Kelley added that these cuts would be on top of reductions in the fiscal 2011 continuing resolution that funded the IRS at $500 million below the president’s request for that year, leading to an ongoing hiring freeze.

The cuts would also put thousands of IRS employees out of work. “These drastic cuts in funding would seriously degrade the taxpayer service and enforcement efforts that play a critical role in reducing the federal deficit,” she wrote. “In particular, these proposed cuts would result in the loss of 3,000 to 4,000 employees,” Kelley said, leading to such serious consequences as a sharply reduced ability to provide effective taxpayer service, and undermining recent progress made in offshore tax evasion, information reporting and debt collection efforts.

The latter consequences would result in the loss of more than $4 billion annually in foregone revenue, she warned.

The administration’s deficit reduction plan calls for increasing IRS enforcement efforts, targeting in particular high revenue-generating enforcement and compliance initiatives that would produce, by the administration’s estimate, a 7 to 1 return on investment—along with helping preserve the fairness and integrity of the tax code.

“NTEU believes the best way Congress can act to reduce the federal deficit is to ensure the IRS has the resources necessary to carry out its enforcement and tax compliance mission,” the union leader wrote.

NTEU is the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.