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Washington, D.C.—A volunteer federal advisory group—whose members are appointed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury Department—has added its voice to those calling for the IRS to drop its plan to use private sector debt collectors to pursue tax debts in exchange for a bounty on the money they collect.

The Taxpayer Advocacy Panel (TAP), established under federal law in 2002 as a way of providing direct taxpayer input to the IRS and improving the agency’s responsiveness to taxpayer concerns, focuses on a variety of issues dealing with the quality of services provided by the IRS, including taxpayer satisfaction. In this fiscal year, it has 95 members across the country.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), who is leading the fight against the IRS privatization plan, welcomed TAP’s opposition, expressed in a letter to IRS Commissioner Mark Everson. The IRS head asked for TAP’s views at a spring meeting.

“TAP’s recommendation adds further weight to the voices of those in both Congress and within the IRS warning of likely problems with the program and calling on the agency not to proceed with the use of private debt collectors,” President Kelley said. She noted the House of Representatives has approved a ban on the IRS’s use of fiscal 2007 funds to implement the privatization initiative.

In calling on the IRS to abandon the program, which is scheduled to begin at the end of this month, TAP said that tax debt collection “is a core function of the IRS” and that collection activities should be restricted “to properly trained and proficient IRS personnel.” The panel’s opposition to the use of debt collectors was one of several matters it addressed relating to taxpayer satisfaction.

TAP warned that the tax debt privatization initiative “is to be implemented at a time when taxpayers are greatly concerned about identity theft, loss of jobs to outsourcing…and the performance irregularities and ethics of government contractors”—all matters that have been part of the concerns raised by NTEU over the past two years.

The volunteer advisory group noted that it had “researched multiple sources to understand the complexities” of the tax privatization program, including gathering and analyzing data from both the IRS and NTEU, as well as from members of Congress, Government Accountability Office, National Taxpayers Union, various media reports on the program, congressional testimony and reports of the National Taxpayer Advocate, and “numerous TAP members with valuable taxpayer input.”

It added that a TAP volunteer “shared his organization’s experiences with outsourcing accounts receivable,” and noted it showed that “over time, the function of managing the contractor’s collection activities became more time-consuming than handling the function internally.” Overall, TAP said, the experiences of the volunteer’s organization with the use of a contractor in this function “were more negative than positive.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 workers in 30 agencies and departments, including 94,000 in the IRS.