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Washington, D.C.—Eight major public interest organizations have joined with the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) in calling on the Senate to approve legislation that would prevent the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from using private collection agencies to pursue tax debts.

In a joint letter to every senator, the groups stressed their concerns about turning millions of taxpayer files over to an industry “with a long record of abuse”—a record clearly shown, they said, by the 66,627 consumer complaints to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against debt collection agencies last year. That number is “far and away the most of any industry,” they wrote.

Further, the groups pointed to an FTC report showing that more than 10 million consumers are victimized by some form of identity theft each year, and warned “it is not clear that the IRS has instituted adequate security protections to ensure that taxpayers’ confidential financial information is not jeopardized.”

The coalition urged senators to co-sponsor S. 3387, a measure introduced by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), and to support its adoption as an amendment if it is offered to other legislation now pending in the Senate.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley, who has been leading the fight against the IRS program to hire private debt collectors in exchange for a bounty paid out of the money they collect, welcomed the broad-based support.

“The more that members of the public and public advocacy groups learn about this unwise and unnecessary IRS program,” she said, “the greater the opposition to it.” She cited growing opposition among members of Congress; the Dorgan-Murray bill is only the latest example. Recently, several senators addressed their concerns about the program in letters to IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.

Along with NTEU, these groups signed the joint letter: Consumer Federation of America; NAACP; National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association; National Consumer Law Center; National Consumers League; Citizens for Tax Justice; National Council of La Raza; and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Despite the clear and mounting criticism, the IRS has begun the program, recently turning over thousands of taxpayer cases to three private debt collection companies. The agency plans to use as many as 10 more private companies to perform this work over the next year or so.

The members of the public interest coalition expressed their concerns with the financial aspects of the program too, noting in their letter that Commissioner Everson admitted in congressional testimony earlier this year that it would cost less to use IRS employees for the collection task.

“At a time of large and growing federal budget deficits,” they wrote, “we fail to see the logic behind the IRS plan to pay private collection firms nearly a quarter of every dollar collected, when internal IRS reports suggest it would cost the federal government just three pennies on the dollar to have trained IRS employees collect tax debts.”

They noted, as well, that the payment of a bounty of up to 24 percent of the money the private companies collect is “in direct conflict” with the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, which specifically prevents IRS employees from being evaluated on the amount of money collected. That, they said, “will clearly encourage overly-aggressive tax collection techniques.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments.