Now I know we all love to hate the IRS. However with that said, they do provide a very important service to our Country. The only problem is there are not enough employee’s there to collect past due tax’s. So in 2006 the IRS started using private bill collectors. While this was a small program, it did collect $80 million in 2 years.
The contract was up for renewal and IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman decided not to renew the program. The question is if a program is working, why would you not renew it? As it stands now that means the IRS will have to hire a 1000 new workers. Which of course means they will have to be full benefits to these new Federal Employees. Does this create jobs? In a way, but what about the bill collectors that were working for this program? What kills me is that instead of keeping something that has been working, and is cost effective, we are going to increase the size of the Federal Government by 1000 workers for this program alone. The program cost about $7.6 million a year to administer, and private contractors were allowed to keep about a quarter of the taxes they collected.
So why did the cancel it? Simple politics. Senator. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee said the IRS used flawed methods to review the program and succumbed to public employee unions and their allies.”It seems the IRS and Treasury Department went out of their way to knock out an emerging, effective and evenhanded way to collect tax debt that the IRS will otherwise never collect,” Grassley said. “It’s discouraging when commonsense efforts to make things fair for honest taxpayers in a way that’s decent and logical all around get beat down by vested, powerful interests in Washington.”
While this is change, it does not appear to be good change.
Patrick Budowski
Maryland
