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Washington, D.C.—A group of Congressional lawmakers from Massachusetts and New Hampshire today called on the head of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to push back to 2012 from next year the agency’s planned shutdown of its paper tax return processing operation in Andover, Mass. Thousands of IRS employees work at the Andover Service Center, a major tax return processing facility.

In a letter circulated by Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Mass.), the Massachusetts and New Hampshire legislators said the planned 2009 target date is based on a projection contained in the 1998 IRS Reform and Restructuring Act that 80 percent of individual federal tax returns would be filed electronically by 2007.

That projection turned out to be overly optimistic; the public-private IRS Oversight Board placed the number of 2006 returns filed electronically last year at only 54 percent. “This transition has not occurred as quickly as projected,” the legislators wrote.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) supported the call for a delay at Andover. “Taxpayers have the option to file paper returns, and a great many will continue to do so,” she said. “These service centers need to remain open and able to handle the large volume of paper returns.” NTEU has worked hard to put in place a variety of mitigation strategies for employees impacted by IRS reorganization efforts.

In their letter, the members of Congress pointed out to newly-confirmed Commissioner Douglas Shulman that even if the anticipated shift to electronic filing materializes, the employees currently processing returns at the Andover facility “possess a program familiarity and institutional memory the IRS cannot replicate elsewhere.”

Indeed, they said, “Andover’s employee knowledge-base has been critical to taxpayers’ smooth transition to the electronic filing process,” noting that the agency’s Andover Service Center was an original location of the IRS’s ‘e-help’ program. “The value of Andover’s expertise will continue to grow as more taxpayers switch to electronic filing,” they wrote.

Moving beyond the issue of assistance with electronic filing, the elected officials also pointed out that Andover employees impacted by any cutback could easily be trained to perform the tax collection work now being sent to private companies under a much-maligned IRS program.

“IRS employees would be more efficient in performing this work than private collection companies,” they wrote, “and could perform those duties at a lower cost.” The IRS recently extended the contracts of two private companies to collect taxes—despite the fact that the program lost $50 million in its first year of operation.

The House of Representatives yesterday approved H.R. 5719, the Taxpayer Assistance and Simplification Act, a tax bill containing a provision that would end IRS use of private companies to collect federal taxes.

In addition to Rep. Tsongas, the letter was signed by Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry and Massachusetts House members Reps. Michael Capuano, Barney Frank, Edward Markey, Richard Neal, William Delahunt, Stephen Lynch, James McGovern, John Olver and John Tierney; as well as New Hampshire House members Reps. Carol Shea-Porter and Paul Hodes. All are Democrats.

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