[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 54 (Tuesday, May 5, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H2781]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 REFORMING THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Blunt). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fox) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. FOX of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise to address the House 
tonight on important legislation. The American taxpayers are expecting 
that we will work together in a bipartisan fashion to change the IRS 
and to scrap the code. The fact is that if you have seen the Senate 
Finance Committee hearings both recently and in the past, in the fall 
of 1997, we learned firsthand how the IRS agents, many of them 
presently employed by the agency, testified under anonymity with cloaks 
over their head, with scrambled speech, in order to reveal for the 
first time just how widespread the culture of fear is at an agency 
which has been out of control for some time, has caused havoc to the 
American citizens. We know that most employees, the great majority, are 
doing their job, but the fact is that at the IRS, we have set into 
circumstances the kind of problems that need to be cured.
  Right now we heard about from IRS agents that there are quotas for 
prosecutions, for audits, for investigations, that in fact there has 
been a situation where the agency has called for each field office to 
have a certain number of audits and investigations, much like you would 
have for a sales organization. That is not how you can run an IRS.
  The fact is this agency needs to turn to a taxpayer-oriented, 
taxpayer-friendly agency, one that is going to be there to help the 
American public. And so I have introduced, Mr. Speaker, the Taxpayer 
Bill of Rights III to answer those complaints that were raised at the 
Senate Finance Committee hearings. My bill will do the following. It 
will change the burden of proof. Instead of the taxpayer being presumed 
guilty and the IRS commissioner being presumed to be correct, the 
taxpayer will be presumed to be innocent and the burden of proof will 
be on the commissioner to prove otherwise. Under my bill, there will be 
no more fishing expeditions. There will be expanded probable cause for 
any investigations by the IRS. And there will be no more quotas. It is 
no more appropriate for us to have quotas on tickets for law 
enforcement agencies any more than it is appropriate to have quotas for 
IRS investigations and audits.
  Under my Taxpayer Bill of Rights, the most important feature would be 
to make sure that the IRS, when they have overreaching and they go 
beyond the law, that they are responsible for their own business, 
individual and legal losses that they cause corporations and they cause 
individuals or any other entities that file taxes with the IRS.
  The Taxpayer Bill of Rights would also call for whistle blower 
protection. If you report wrongdoing at the agency, then you cannot be 
audited for coming forward to tell the truth.
  Finally, if you want to settle a claim that you have with the IRS, 
then the IRS must appoint a mediator for the purpose of settling that 
claim. We have in the United States, Mr. Speaker, over 100,000 IRS 
employees but only 43 taxpayer advocates, less than one per State. We 
need to change the balance so that we put the ``Service'' back in the 
Internal Revenue Service. We can make these changes if we work with the 
new commissioner, who has expressed an interest in reforming the 
agency.
  We look forward to working with IRS employees to make this a reality 
and working also with the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Largent) and the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Paxon) to make sure we scrap the code and 
replace it with one that is flatter and fairer to the American people.
  I thank the Speaker for this time to address these important issues 
of scrapping the code and reforming the IRS. I look forward to working 
with my colleagues in a bipartisan fashion to pass these items.




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