Budget Cuts At the Internal Revenue Service

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, this week in 2 days is April 15, the day that our income taxes are due. We have seen that day difficult enough under the best of circumstances, be made even more difficult, purposely, for millions of Americans. My Republican friends have decided to take out their differences with the IRS, their opposition to taxation, by deliberately torturing the American taxpayer.

Ours is the largest tax system in the world that relies primarily on volunteer compliance. Each 1 percent where people decide not to comply costs the Treasury $30 billion. Now, most, in fact, do comply, but an ever-increasingly complex tax system makes compliance difficult.

It should be noted that it is not the IRS that makes the Tax Code complicated; it is Congress that is constantly changing that Code. Sometimes it is so late in meeting its obligations with tax changes that the Service doesn't even have time to print the forms on time.

In order to help citizens with Congress' complex tax system, the Internal Revenue Service runs the largest consumer service operation in the world. Last year, it was a disaster. Well, this process has been deliberately sabotaged by the Republican approach to the agency budget. It has 30,000 fewer employees than it had in 1992, down 13,000 from 2010, despite the fact that the Code gets more complex and there are more people filing returns every year.

Congress should have been a constructive partner in streamlining, modernization, with new computers, but the IRS budget prevents it from modernizing information technology. It still uses applications that were running in the early 1960s. And you cannot completely computerize the simple task of answering phone calls and talking to taxpayers.

When you visit the IRS offices, as I have, you find employees who are sad and angry that they are unable to meet the needs of the taxpayers. They don't like getting somebody who has been on hold for 20 or 30 minutes and then not having the time to work with them to answer their questions. It frustrates the taxpayer, and it breaks the heart of our employees.

Now, it is no secret that some people forget or cheat on their taxes, but Congress has not equipped the IRS to do the audits necessary to actually collect the money that is due. This year, when we have a big deficit, there will be $300 to $400 billion of taxes that are due and owing but won't be paid. Yet Congress is deliberately trying to make it worse. They have 12,000 fewer enforcement staff, a reduction of 23 percent, and I am going back to a Ways and Means Committee where one of the proposals would cut that budget another $500 million. It is not fair to the taxpayer, it is not fair to our employees, and it makes it hard to fund the needs of our Nation.

People talk around here about running government like a business. What business undercuts, underfunds, and slashes its accounts receivable department? They may think it is good politics to make the taxpayer experience as miserable as possible, but it is ultimately bad judgment, poor politics, and a disservice to the American people as we undercut the ability to fund essential government services.

Many of my Republican colleagues have been looking for scandal within the IRS. Whatever problems they uncover or imagine, the real scandal is how they are treating the American public and the people who work for them at the vital service of the Internal Revenue Service.

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