[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 54 (Wednesday, April 15, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H2216-H2217]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, today is April 15. This is the day that 
our income taxes are due, a day that is difficult enough under the best 
of circumstances, but made even more difficult, purposefully, for 
millions of Americans.
  My Republican friends have decided to take out their differences with 
the IRS by deliberately torturing the American taxpayer. Ours is the 
largest tax system in the world that relies primarily on voluntary 
compliance. Most Americans, in fact, do comply, but an ever-
increasingly complex tax system makes that compliance difficult.
  It should be noted that it is not the IRS that makes the Tax Code 
complex; it is Congress that makes the Tax Code complex, a Congress 
that is sometimes so late in meeting its obligations with tax changes 
that the Service has difficulty even printing the forms on time as 
these changes occur every single year.
  In order to help citizens with Congress' complex tax system, the 
Internal Revenue Service runs the largest consumer service operation in 
the world, but this process has been deliberately sabotaged by the 
Republican approach to the agency budget.
  The agency has 30,000 fewer employees today than it had in 1992. The 
real budget adjusted for inflation is about the level we had in 1998, 
when we had fewer taxpayers filing returns and a Tax Code that was 
smaller and less complicated.
  If Congress had truly been partners with the agency in improving its 
service in streamlining and modernization and giving them today's 
computers, maybe it would be possible to keep pace, but the IRS has 
been given a budget that prevents it from modernizing its information 
technology. It uses applications for its computers that were running in 
the early 1960s.
  The IRS is virtually a museum of computer technology, but you cannot 
modernize the simple call service function of answering phones and 
talking to taxpayers, yet Congress has deliberately slashed that money 
available for those positions.
  When you visit the IRS offices, which I have and which I hope every 
one of my colleagues does before they reduce those budgets yet again, 
they will find employees who simply cannot meet the needs of their 
customers.
  Our employees don't like putting people on hold for 20 minutes, 30 
minutes, or more or dropping the calls altogether. It frustrates the 
taxpayer, and it breaks the hearts of our employees.

                              {time}  1015

  Now, it is no secret that some people forget to declare all of their 
income, and, frankly, there are some people who actually cheat on their 
taxes, but Congress has not equipped the IRS to do the audits necessary 
to actually collect the money that is due--billions and billions of 
dollars--which would pay for badly needed government services or reduce 
our debt.
  They refuse to fund some positions that would not just pay for 
themselves but would collect 10, 20, 30 times or more their annual 
salaries, and Congress is deliberately making it worse with yet another 
budget cut while watching the exodus of highly trained, skilled 
professionals who have better things to do with their lives than work 
in an impossible situation and constantly be under attack.
  I have no doubt that there are times when the agency has not 
performed in ways that we would all like, but the solution is not to 
torture the taxpayers and fail to equip the agency to do its job while 
continuing to make the Tax Code ever more complex.
  This is gross political malpractice. It is not fair to the taxpayers; 
it is a disservice to our employees; and it makes it hard to fund the 
needs of our Nation. They may think it is good politics to make the 
taxpaying experience as miserable as possible, but it is, ultimately, 
bad judgment; it is poor politics; and it is a disservice to the 
American public.

[[Page H2217]]

  Many of my colleagues have been looking at scandal within the IRS. 
Whatever problems they uncover or imagine, the real scandal is how the 
Republican budget is treating the American public and the people who 
work for them at the vital service of the Internal Revenue Service.

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