IRS Employees warn Public re: Private Collections

This is so important to taxpayers that I am reprinting it in total.


IRS Tax Collection Privatization Program Amounts to Throwing Away Taxpayer Money
It is very difficult to understand why the Internal Revenue Service would pay private contractors far more money to collect a modest amount of taxes than it would for IRS employees to collect a great deal more in taxes. The private companies could earn as much as $350 million over the next 10 years, if the IRS plan moves forward.
“At a time of record federal deficits, this makes no sense,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), talking about the IRS plan to hire private sector debt collectors to pursue tax debts in exchange for a bounty of up to 25 percent of the money they collect.
IRS Commissioner Mark Everson has openly admitted twice that it would cost more to hire the private collection agencies to pursue the tax debts than to have IRS employees do the work.
The bounty of $25 to collect $100 in tax debts by the private companies is in sharp contrast to figures provided by the previous IRS commissioner who said that IRS employees could return ten times as much money to the Treasury as debt collectors.
Overall, the estimate by the IRS is that its tax collection privatization program, if it runs over the next decade, would generate about $1.4 billion in collections—but, with a bounty of up to 25 percent, would cost the government some $350 million. More...

IRS Flunks Government Review
With the end of the tax-filing season just days away, taxpayers should “find it alarming in the extreme” that the IRS itself has failed—and miserably so—two audits by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) regarding its customer service operations.
“These audits highlight critical information and decision-making flaws in the operation of this vital agency,” said NTEU President Kelley. “The IRS is basing its decisions about serving taxpayers on bad or nonexistent data.”
First, Kelley said, a TIGTA analysis of the IRS decision-making process in the agency’s failed effort to close 68 of its Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs) showed the IRS’s work to be so shoddy that TIGTA said it was “unable to determine the effect TAC closings would have on compliance”—thus preventing the Inspector General from fulfilling a mandate given to it by Congress.
Then, a follow-up TIGTA audit—the second of three planned reports by TIGTA on IRS customer service cutbacks—showed that despite a congressional mandate preventing the IRS from closing any of its TACs during the 2006 filing season, the agency apparently continues to consider such closings as a cost-cutting measure