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Washington, D.C.—The latest Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the underpayment of federal payroll taxes—some $58 billion owed by more than 1.6 million businesses—sharply underscores the need for additional staffing and resources for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the leader of the union representing IRS employees said today.
"Withholding these taxes from employees and not paying them to the government clearly violates the law, but it also erodes the confidence in our system of the vast majority of taxpayers who voluntarily comply with their tax obligations,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).
“The continuing growth in these outstanding tax debts,” she added, “is another example of the price paid by our nation when the IRS lacks sufficient staff and resources to do the job the public expects it to do. Without sufficient staff and adequate resources, the IRS will continue to be hard-pressed to collect the nation’s taxes.”
The NTEU leader noted pointedly the overall decline in the IRS workforce, from 114,064 employees in 1995 to only 86,638 in 2007—and more particularly to declines of 33 percent among revenue officers and 20 percent among revenue agents. These are the two key groups of employees responsible for IRS collection activities.
“When you reduce your workforce as the IRS has over the past decade or so,” she said, “you inevitably wind up losing both on the enforcement side and in your ability to improve voluntary compliance with the tax laws by providing taxpayer education and assistance.”
NTEU has long been critical of continuing IRS efforts to reduce the amount of in-person and telephone help available to taxpayers; the union led the successful effort to prevent the IRS from closing 68 of its Taxpayer Assistance Centers across the country, and has criticized IRS moves to cut back hours that telephone assistors are available and force taxpayers to seek self-help via the IRS web site.
“It is well-known, both inside the IRS and outside of it,” President Kelley said, “that enforcement and voluntary compliance are two sides of the same coin. There is no other way to position this agency to perform the critical revenue-raising task which has been entrusted to it than to rebuild its workforce.”