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Washington, D.C.-A sharp decline in enforcement actions by the Internal Revenue Service over the past year, including audits of tax returns, is "very strong evidence" of the need for Congress to provide the IRS with the additional funds it needs to meet its varied and critical responsibilities to the nation's taxpayers, including not just enforcement of the tax laws but high-quality customer service and taxpayer education and assistance, the head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said today.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley made the comment in response to an IRS report showing that the audit rate of individual returns in fiscal 2000 fell to 0.49 percent from 0.89 percent the previous year. The liens, levies and other tax collection actions taken by the agency over the past year have fallen by [xx] percent. "There is simply no way for this critical agency to perform effectively the vital functions assigned to by Congress without adequate and stable funding, particularly as the IRS continues to undergo the most far-reaching modernization of a government agency in our nation's history."

Apart from generating large amounts of needed revenue, the NTEU president said, successful IRS collection efforts have the additional benefit of helping "assure the vast majority of Americans who voluntarily and properly meet their tax obligations under the law that those who do not will be made to pay their fair share" of the nation's expenses.

Kelley said that one of the key problems generated by lack of funding to hire sufficient staff is that during the tax-filing season, IRS collection employees often are shifted in large numbers to customer service functions. This has been particularly true over the past two years in light of the growing effort to improve IRS customer service and taxpayer education.

In congressional testimony on this issue last year, Kelley noted that the number of Revenue Agents had declined by 17 percent since 1995-a year when Congress provided several billion dollars for targeted collection enforcement actions-and that further cuts in this key category of agency employee were likely.

In the wake of today's IRS announcement, Kelley noted that a section of the 1998 restructuring law mandating termination of IRS employment for workers found to have engaged in any one of 10 specific acts-collectively known as the "ten deadly sins"-has played a role in declining collections, even though not a single one of the more than 800 allegations against employees brought under the law has been found to warrant the loss of an employee's job.

"Section 1203(b) of the 1998 law clearly has had a chilling effect on collections," Kelley said, "and it has forced employees to perform their jobs in an atmosphere that contains an unwarranted and unfair degree of anxiety. This part of the law needs to be repealed, or at least substantially revised", she said, adding that NTEU has made that one of its legislative priorities in the 107th Congress.

Everyone supports improved customer service and taxpayer education, Kelley said, particularly IRS employees, but she noted that an emphasis in this key area "should not come at the expense of collecting taxes." The nation "can afford to fund the IRS" in a way that allows it to do the job its employees are dedicated to doing," she said, including modernizing the agency's technology and processes and dedicating more resources to employee training and career development.