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Washington, D.C. — The leader in the fight to end the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) program of private tax collection today called on the House of Representatives to approve legislation that would repeal the agency’s authority to continue its costly program that puts taxpayers’ sensitive and private information at great risk.
The House is expected to vote tomorrow on H.R. 3056, legislation advanced by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which would repeal IRS authority to hire private debt collectors to pursue tax debts. Earlier this year, a Ways and Means Committee hearing on the IRS tax privatization program revealed multiple, serious violations of taxpayer rights by private debt collectors.
“I welcome the upcoming vote on H.R. 3056,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), who has been leading the fight against not only the IRS program but this administration’s program of runaway contracting of federal jobs as well.
“Approval of this legislation would be the most definitive declaration yet of the clear, strong and bipartisan opposition in both the House and Senate to the IRS’s use of private debt collectors,” the NTEU leader said. “It would be a major step forward in stopping this misguided, costly program.”
The IRS gained congressional authority to hire private debt collectors several years ago in unrelated tax legislation. Since then, it awarded contracts to three private companies—only two of whose contracts were renewed.
NTEU’s opposition to the program has been fierce from the outset and unrelenting since then. The union, joined by members of Congress and a number of private sector public interest groups, repeatedly has pointed out that IRS employees can perform the work of collecting taxes at far less cost than private collectors.
That matter is not even at issue; the IRS itself has agreed with that argument. The private companies are paid a bounty of up to 25 percent of the money they collect.
In addition to cost, NTEU has underscored the dangers to taxpayers not only in terms of the security of their personal financial information but of the risks of facing the abusive tactics that debt collectors are so well-known to use. Such tactics, in fact, were a focus of the Ways and Means Committee hearing on the program.