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Washington, D.C.—Unless Congress restores critical funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), further degradation will occur in taxpayer services, and that will jeopardize our nation’s voluntary tax compliance system, the leader of the union representing IRS employees cautioned a Senate subcommittee today.

In testimony submitted to the Senate Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee, President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) warned of increasingly-severe customer service issues for taxpayers.

Without additional funding in fiscal 2015, she said, “taxpayers will continue experiencing a degradation of services.” Kelley offered these examples of the problems: “Difficulty seeking telephone assistance; delays in responses to letters, including those seeking to resolve issues with taxes due; and delayed responses to small-business owners or individual taxpayers looking to set up payment plans.”

Noting that IRS funding has been cut by nearly $1 billion—a reduction of almost 8 percent since 2010—the NTEU leader supported the White House fiscal 2015 proposal to boost the IRS budget by $1.1 billion over the fiscal 2014 level.

“This would help restore funding for important taxpayer services and enforcement activities that have been slashed in recent years,” Kelley told the subcommittee. She added that funding reductions have adversely impacted IRS ability to meet its mission, “and without action by Congress, IRS’ ability to serve taxpayers and enforce our nation’s tax laws will continue to erode.”

As part of the broad issue of taxpayer service, Kelley called the attention of subcommittee members to the budget-driven decision by the IRS to limit the amount of live assistance to taxpayers actively seeking help.

“That will be detrimental to efforts to increase compliance with our nation’s tax laws, and only serves to harm those taxpayers who rely on the assistance of qualified and experienced IRS employees to understand and meet their tax obligation,” she said.

Kelley took note of the many experts in the tax community who have warned of the dangers of underfunding the IRS and the adverse impact on taxpayer services and other IRS programs, including enforcement. These include, she said, the National Taxpayer Advocate, the IRS Oversight Board and the IRS Advisory Council.

Just this week, Forbes joined those ranks by describing the budget situation at the IRS as “a crisis.” The magazine pointed to the impact on what it described as “an explosion of identity theft tax refund fraud” as part of an increasing workload for a shrinking IRS workforce.

Separately, President Kelley emphasized the presence of a qualified and experienced IRS workforce to criticize once again a proposal to force the Treasury Department to use private collection companies to collect taxes. The effort is contained in a package of tax extenders pending in Congress.

“This has been tried twice and it has failed twice,” she said. Private companies simply cannot do what IRS employees are trained and qualified to do, she added, including answering questions about filing status and balance due issues; providing advice on withholding issues; assisting with dependent children claims; fixing simple math errors; and extending an offer-in-compromise, which is an agreement between a struggling taxpayer and the agency that settles a tax debt for less than the full amount owed.

“In contrast,” she said, “the sole authority of (private collection companies) is to collect from a taxpayer the balance due amount they have been provided.”

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