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Washington, D.C—In the wake of a national media report about the increasingly prevalent abusive tactics used by debt collection companies, the leader of the union representing Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees today called again on the IRS to drop its plans to turn over the personal and private information of some 2.6 million taxpayers to debt collectors.

“The collection industry is the breeding ground for abusive tactics,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). “Clearly, this is not the direction the IRS should be taking.”

She said a front-page article in today’s New York Times “provides frightening examples of the lengths to which debt collectors will go, and the abuses they will pile on people in pursuit of their profits.”

President Kelley has been leading the fight against an IRS plan to hire private sector debt collectors to pursue tax debts in exchange for a bounty of up 25 percent of the money they collect. In addition to NTEU’s strong opposition, there is growing concern among members of Congress about the program, including the costs involved and the serious risks to taxpayer information.

The House has approved language in the fiscal 2007 Transportation-Treasury Appropriations bill that would prevent the IRS from spending any money on the program; and other legislation—H.R. 1621—is pending in the House that would revoke the agency’s authority to hire private debt collectors.

The Times article notes that a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report earlier this year identified the debt collection industry as the most complained-about in the country; the FTC received more than 66,600 consumer complaints about third-party debt collectors last year—nearly six times the number reported in 1999.

What more, the newspaper quotes the commission’s annual report as identifying a number of abusive tactics that have become particularly common in that industry. These include misrepresenting the nature, size and status of a debt; making constant harassing and abusive phone calls at all hours; contacting a debtor’s relatives, employers and neighbors; failing to investigate claims by consumers that a debt is paid, expired or fraudulent; and threatening to sue or seek prosecutions.

“It amazes me that the IRS is seemingly oblivious to the major problems and dangers inherent in turning over tax collection—and the taxpayer information that goes with it—to this industry which clearly has shown it can’t be trusted with it,” President Kelley said. “It is well past time for the IRS to cancel this program.”

Despite the abject failure of a pilot program of tax privatization a decade ago, and despite the agency’s poor record of contractor oversight, the IRS has awarded contracts to three private collection firms, with plans to award up to 10 such contracts over the next few years.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments, including some 90,000 in the IRS.