A top GOP senator lashed out at a union representing IRS employees on Wednesday, after the labor group criticized a Senate proposal to use private contractors to help collect taxes.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a former chairman of the Finance Committee, said the National Treasury Employees Union had no business bashing the plan for private collectors after the IRS suffered a decline in customer service this most recent filing season.
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“The IRS just had one of the worst filing seasons for customer service on record, according to the agency’s own taxpayer advocate,” Grassley said, noting that the number of “courtesy disconnects” – when the agency hung up on a taxpayer who’d been kept on hold – skyrocketed this year.
Grassley maintained that the IRS isn’t really pursuing many of the tax debts that the collection agencies would try to get. “It seems unlikely to do so any time soon when it has trouble answering the phone from people who are trying to pay their taxes,” he said. “It’s hard to see the logic for the resistance.”
Of course, the NTEU, IRS officials and Democratic supporters of the agency have said there’s a good reason that taxpayer services declined this year – the steep decline in the agency’s funding in recent years.
The IRS budget for 2015 is $10.9 billion – more than $1 billion less than in 2010. GOP appropriators in both the House and the Senate have called for more cuts for 2016, looking for further savings from an unpopular agency as money gets tight.
Colleen Kelley, the NTEU’s president, told senators on Tuesday that the use of private debt collectors has proven to be a waste of taxpayer dollars in the past, and reduces the amount of protections that taxpayers have in dealing with the government.
Debt collectors, Kelley said, are solely focused on collecting whatever debt they’ve been told is outstanding.
“They have no interest in whether the taxpayer owes other taxes or may not have filed required returns, nor do they have access to any other taxpayer records, so they are unable to answer any questions, provide any advice or use any of the tools IRS employees have, such as extensions or offers in compromise,” Kelley said.