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Washington, D.C.—Fourteen members of the House Ways and Means Committee, including its chairman and the head of its Oversight Subcommittee, have called on President-elect Barack Obama to end the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) use of private tax collectors by declining to renew the existing two contracts for the program and by not expanding it as planned.

The House members said in a letter to the president-elect that collecting taxes is an inherently governmental function and “in light of the current economic situation, it is important that the administration protect taxpayers by ensuring that they deal with the IRS directly to work through any difficulties.”

The letter is signed by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.); Oversight Subcommittee Chairman John Lewis (D-Ga.); and Ways and Means members Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Pete Stark (D-Calif.), Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.), Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), Allyson Y. Schwartz (D-Pa.), Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.) and Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.).

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), who has been leading the fight against privatizing tax collection, applauded the letter. “This program has been a financial failure and even the IRS acknowledges the work could be done more cost-effectively by IRS employees,” she said. “Renewing the contracts—much less extending the program—would just perpetuate the waste, risk and abuse. It is past time to end this program.”

Rep. Van Hollen, sponsor of the Taxpayer Abuse and Harassment Prevention Act, said: “The House of Representatives has repeatedly voted to terminate authority for the IRS’s misguided private tax collection program. This letter is a powerful statement from Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rangel, Subcommittee Chairman Lewis and a majority of committee Democrats that the time has come to put an end to this wasteful program and make tax collection the inherently governmental function it was intended to be.”

In addition to the president-elect, the House members’ letter went to Peter Orszag, director-designee of the Office of Management and Budget; Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner; and IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman.

The letter notes that in the 110th Congress, the House approved three bills that would repeal the authority of the IRS to use private collection agencies. Over the past several years, there has been growing bipartisan opposition to privatizing tax collections; moreover, the IRS’s own National Taxpayer Advocate—along with representatives of a wide range of consumer and public interest groups—has called for an end to the program.

“There is overwhelming evidence that this program is a costly failure,” President Kelley said. “The much better path is to make sure the IRS has adequate funding and staffing to do the job the public expects and needs it to do. Right now, this agency has neither.”

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