[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 42 (Thursday, April 10, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1410-H1411]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  MEMORIES OF TAX RETURNS AND THE IRS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Washington [Mrs. Smith] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. LINDA SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, this time of the year 
always brings back memories to me, because for nearly 15 years I was up 
to my nose in tax returns and trips to IRS for clients. In my other 
world, I prepared tax returns and taught the changes of the law to tax 
preparers. It always disturbed me when I would go to Internal Revenue 
with the expertise of the agents, not all of them but many, but also 
the amount of information that they had about our private lives.

                              {time}  1215

  So you can imagine that it was more personal for me when Tuesday of 
this week I got a report that IRS had been snooping again. You see, 
several years ago there was a report that there was a lot of private 
snooping going on in private records of individual citizens, some 
celebrities, some people just like me, by Internal Revenue agents. For 
what purpose, I do not know. Some were convicted. Not many. But it was 
a pretty extensive report.
  And IRS promised us at that time, whether we be citizens or people 
that represented citizens before IRS or preparers, that they would stop 
doing it, that they would rein this practice in and protect the privacy 
of the ordinary American citizen.
  Well, this Tuesday, the document release says they are not doing it. 
In fact, it was so serious it showed that in 1994 and 1995 alone, there 
were documented 1515 cases where employees were accused of misusing 
computers, snooping.
  Now, the sad part about this is there were not very many firings. It 
says in the report that they counseled most of the employees; 472 were 
counseled, 349 were disciplined, but it does not appear in anything 
other than a hand slap. Only 23 were fired.
  Now, in our country the right to privacy and protection of our 
private lives is very, very important. That is what makes us America.
  Mr. Speaker, we should not have the servants of the people, whether 
they be police, FBI, whatever, but especially not IRS, violating our 
privacy.
  Next week we will have a bill on this floor that will take care of 
that. We are not going to put it into a study. We are not going to 
trust IRS to say, we will do it if you wait. We are going to tell them 
that they are going to do it.
  But how we are going to do it is this way: We are going to say, if 
you snoop, you have civil penalties and criminal penalties. If you 
snoop and tell, which is really awful, but that has happened,

[[Page H1411]]

you talk about the private lives of citizens, you can go to jail even 
if you are an IRS employee. Why should they be any different than any 
other citizen? They are just servants of the people.
  Next week is also going to focus on something that has been the 
compelling issue that brought me into politics originally in the early 
1980's.
  In the early 1980's, it was actually a State tax increase that 
doubled the taxes on my small business. I never had more than 125 
employees at any one time; but I faced, with regulation and a doubling 
of my small business tax, laying off employees.
  It got my attention. And I realized that American families, whether 
running a small business, like me, or my employees, could be hurt by 
government not being able to control spending.
  You see, what I saw was our State had doubled their spending 
percentage nearly regularly over 20 years. What that means is every 2 
years the spending increase was 20 percent, 10 percent a year, while 
the people's ability to pay got up 3 to 5 percent a year.
  And as that happened and government grew, it was so easy, you see, to 
raise taxes instead of control spending, that what we faced were 
ordinary people, like me, running a small business in Vancouver, WA, 
facing taxes that we were having one heck of a time paying.
  So I ran for office and got mad. I ran for office and I kept changing 
things. I ran an initiative in our State that said we will control 
spending and will make it tougher to raise taxes. It always should be a 
little tougher to raise taxes than to tax the American people, whether 
it be at the State or Federal level, than to increase spending, because 
you cannot tell a bureaucracy no.
  Mr. Speaker, we passed that as an initiative in our State. And guess 
what? The spending growth is now 5 percent a year for the public 
government, and it is more in line with the ability of the people to 
pay. This worked. It will work when we pass the same measure next week.
  On the floor next week will be a supermajority to raise taxes. And it 
worked in our State. It will work in our Nation. And I encourage 
watching for that vote and see how Members of Congress vote.

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