[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 62 (Thursday, April 21, 2016)]
[House]
[Pages H1905-H1908]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      BAN ON IRS BONUSES UNTIL SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY DEVELOPS 
                COMPREHENSIVE CUSTOMER SERVICE STRATEGY


                             General Leave

  Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may 
have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks 
and to include extraneous materials on H.R. 4890.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bishop of Michigan). Is there objection 
to the request of the gentleman from Pennsylvania?
  There was no objection.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 688 and rule 
XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House 
on the state of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 4890.
  The Chair appoints the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Rodney Davis) to 
preside over the Committee of the Whole.

                              {time}  0957


                     In the Committee of the Whole

  Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the 
Whole House on the state of the Union for the consideration of the bill 
(H.R. 4890) to impose a ban on the payment of bonuses to employees of 
the Internal Revenue Service until the Secretary of the Treasury 
develops and implements a comprehensive customer service strategy, with 
Mr. Rodney Davis of Illinois in the chair.
  The Clerk read the title of the bill.
  The CHAIR. Pursuant to the rule, the bill is considered read the 
first time.
  The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Meehan) and the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Levin) each will control 30 minutes.
  The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  I am before the House today--really, before the Nation--on behalf of 
all of those frustrated taxpayers who have spent a great part of the 
last month, if not months before, in preparing their taxes in what is 
an increasingly complex Code. While we have a mission to simplify that 
Code, the fact of the matter is they have to deal with the challenges 
that they face today.
  One of the agencies that they interact with or hope to interact with 
when they have questions is something called the Internal Revenue 
Service. I want to focus on that third word--``service''--because the 
idea here is we don't have some oversight agency, and we don't have 
some agency whose obligation and purpose in life is to make it harder 
on the average hardworking taxpayers, who are supporting the government 
with the money that they earn; it is to be a service--to use their 
resources to help the hardworking Americans who must pay taxes--and to 
simplify the process, particularly when they have questions of a very, 
very complex Code and its requirements that are being put on each and 
every one of them. When we talk about service, what we need to see is a 
pattern; and what we see is a pattern by which, unfortunately, the 
service of the IRS is deteriorating rapidly.
  Let me give you the facts, and I am talking about what they call the 
answer time.
  When an individual gets on the telephone because he is frustrated and 
he calls the IRS and says, ``I have a question,'' this year, the IRS 
estimates it will receive 48.4 million calls with people asking for 
assistance. Do you know how many they will answer? Sixteen million. 
That means that 32 million

[[Page H1906]]

taxpayers will call the service, and their calls will go unanswered.

                              {time}  1000

  What kind of private entity could survive in this day and age if that 
was the kind of service that they were providing? What we are seeing is 
that this is going in a backwards fashion.
  If you are able to get through and finally talk to somebody, the wait 
times a few years ago were 18.7 minutes. Well, how many people who are 
working at home, have other jobs, are doing things have 18.7 minutes 
just to wait for a phone call to be answered on an issue that they 
already have anxiety about? Well, those were the good old days, Mr. 
Chairman, 18.7 minutes, because today it is 34.4 minutes. If you are 
one of the lucky 30 percent who even gets their call answered, you wait 
34.4 minutes.
  It even gets better because what the IRS has implemented is a program 
now called a courtesy disconnect. Well, if that isn't the most 
oxymoronic thing that I have heard--a courtesy disconnect. In other 
words, we are going to tell you ahead of time, when you call, we are 
going to disconnect your call right away because we are going to tell 
you you are not going to be able to get through in time, so don't waste 
your time trying to contact the IRS. Now, that just exacerbates the 
level of frustration.
  So what do we do about it? What is a solution? Let me tell you, Mr. 
Chairman, this isn't something that the Republicans on this side of the 
aisle have sat and said: Oh, let's go get the IRS.
  Mr. Chairman, the GAO, which has overlooked this agency for, now, 3 
straight years has been calling on the IRS to do something very simple. 
What they say is create a strategy and a plan to do a better job of 
answering those calls, of being responsive to those very taxpayers that 
your service requires you to do so. Just create a plan. It is that 
simple.
  The GAO issued recommendations to the IRS that they first outline a 
strategy that defines appropriate levels of telephone and 
correspondence service and wait time lists and get specific steps to 
manage service based on an assessment of timeframes, demand 
capabilities, and resources. Just tell us how you can do it better.
  Number two was direct the appropriate officials to systematically and 
empirically compare its telephone service to the best in business to 
identify gaps between actual and desired performance; in other words, 
see how it is being done in other places and aspire to do it as well. 
Well, as I said again, go back to the private sector. I imagine the 
people aren't making 60 percent of the people that call, they don't 
even answer it.
  Lastly, just improve taxpayer service by requiring the Secretary of 
the Treasury to develop a comprehensive customer service strategy. That 
is what the GAO asked them to do. This recommendation has been repeated 
year after year. Unfortunately, the response of the IRS to the GAO was 
that their existing efforts were sufficient. They have yet to devise 
this plan.
  Mr. Chairman, you tell me, when 60 percent of the calls are 
unanswered and those that are calling have wait times of over 35 
minutes, tell me where that is sufficient. And therein lies the heart 
of the problem, the complete unwillingness to do a simple issue and to 
be responsive.
  Now, there are other reasons, perhaps, that the IRS is diverting the 
very resources that have been put in by this Congress to support 
taxpayer services. In fact, the commitment to those taxpayer services 
has gone down dramatically each and every year:
  In 2013, they put $190 million into ensuring that there were 
appropriate taxpayer services; and then, in 2014, they decreased it to 
$183 million to ensure that there were appropriate taxpayer services; 
and then, in 2015, they put $45 million into it.
  So at a time when the GAO is telling them to do better, they are 
speaking with their own specific acts to say: We think it is 
sufficient. And not only do we think it is sufficient, we are actually 
pulling resources away from relations to the very taxpayers that we 
have an obligation to service.
  Mr. Chairman, the bill is really quite simple, and it is in response 
to that continuing unresponsiveness of those who manage the IRS. It is 
simply saying to do what you have been requested to do.
  Now, despite three GAO reports and continuing oversight by Congress, 
the refusal to be responsive to that, we looked and said a very simple 
thing. It says do not pay bonuses to the employees until you have 
fulfilled the very simple requirement of coming up with this plan.
  Now, somebody might say to me: Well, that is outrageous. Put new 
obligations on the IRS. They have not done it in 3 years.
  But guess who has? The Department of Labor does it. The Department of 
Agriculture does it. The Department of Education does it. The Office of 
Management and Budget does it. Each and every one of them, I would 
suggest to you, Mr. Chairman, probably have a lot less interaction with 
everyday Americans, but they have taken the time to put together that 
plan.
  So there is a template. We are not asking a whole lot. It has been 
specific, laid out in the GAO report, simply to do that.
  So we are asking very simply in the bill, do your job; and until you 
have done that job, which other agencies are very capable of doing, no 
bonuses get paid.
  It doesn't say no bonuses get paid at all. In fact, this is not 
antiworker. In fact, hardworking people at the IRS--and there are 
many--they can get rewarded for appropriate work that they do. But 
don't pay those bonuses until you, management, answer to them why you 
won't do the service agreement or service plan. You tell your employees 
why you won't do it. Don't go blaming it on somebody else. That is the 
very simple request that we have, which is to make the plan before you 
write the bonuses.
  Mr. Chairman, that is not asking for much. It is certainly not asking 
for much on behalf of the frustrated taxpayers of the United States who 
are seeing a demonstrated inability to communicate with the very agency 
that is responsible for helping them solve the questions that they have 
with respect to the complexities of the Tax Code.
  Mr. Chairman, I look forward to continuing to debate this issue.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  What we are facing today is the worst kind of demagoguery, and really 
it descends to propaganda.
  Look, the reason the phones aren't being answered is because the 
Republican majority has failed to answer to its responsibilities. The 
appropriations have been going down. The last 5 years, the budget cut 
for IRS has been close to $1 billion.
  So you try to hide from your failure and you point your finger 
everyplace except where it belongs--yourselves. You want to say no 
bonuses to the 80,000 people because this House majority has failed to 
meet its basic responsibility, and that is to fund so that there can be 
adequate resources to answer the phones. You are the ones who have shut 
it off.
  So the problem is not a lack of strategy; it is a lack of resources. 
The House Republicans are trying to pass the buck because they are not 
providing the bucks necessary for adequate taxpayer services.
  We had this chart yesterday, and here it is again. This shows, in the 
yellow, the amount of resources. In the blue, it shows the average time 
to answer the phone. As the resources have gone down, the time it takes 
has gone up. That is a simple fact. The only time that changed was when 
this institution provided some adequate resources, and so the time to 
answer the phones went down.
  Now you are back at it again, diminishing the resources, and you are 
essentially blaming the 80,000 people who don't get the adequate 
resources to do their jobs.
  Now you say let's have a plan. There is already a system, but you 
don't provide the resources to carry it out. You are saying come up 
with a plan that will be looked at and approved by the inspector 
general that doesn't have that responsibility. So that is why the White 
House stands in opposition, and I read:
  ``Legislation constraining the IRS's ability to retain and recruit 
highly qualified employees is not needed and could be counterproductive 
to the Service's mission.''

[[Page H1907]]

  So I am going to point out other things you haven't done. Mr. Crowley 
laid them out very, very well.
  This place, under your leadership, has been bankrupt in terms of 
addressing the critical needs of the budget, the problems in Flint, the 
problems faced by Puerto Rico, the problems faced by thousands of 
people because of Zika. So you come here and you say, well, the IRS 
isn't doing its job. You are not doing your job. Don't go after an 
agency for not being able to answer the telephone when you essentially 
are cutting the lines of resources. It is outrageous. It is outrageous, 
and I think the people will know.
  I say this to my constituents. When you call up and it takes hours, 
call up your local Member of Congress, especially if he or she a member 
of the majority here. Call them up. If they don't answer the phone, try 
email. And if there is no response, call one of us who are working to 
provide the adequate resources for the IRS to answer the phones, and we 
will try to find a way for you to communicate with your Member, if that 
person has failed to meet his responsibilities. The blame is on your 
doorstep. Don't try to shift it.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  The Acting CHAIR (Mr. Poe of Texas). Members of the House are 
reminded to address their remarks to the Chair and not to each other in 
the second person.
  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Chair, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from 
New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell) control the remainder of my time.
  The Acting CHAIR. The gentleman from New Jersey will be recognized.
  Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chair, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished 
gentleman from California (Mr. McCarthy).
  Mr. McCARTHY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding and 
his work.
  Mr. Chairman, every year the American people pay their taxes; and 
every year to do that, they have to deal with an agency that is inept 
and increasingly unethical.
  You can't make this stuff up. The IRS failed to answer 8 million 
calls during tax season last year. Yet, over a short 5-year period, 
they handed out nearly $6 million in bonuses to themselves.

                              {time}  1015

  Just to make this clear, that means the IRS can't take the taxpayers' 
phone calls, but they sure as heck can take the taxpayers' money for 
their bonuses.
  Or how about this? The inspector general found that nearly 1,600 IRS 
employees willfully avoided paying their own taxes over a 10-year 
period; yet, we trust these same people to collect taxes from their 
fellow citizens.
  How is it that the agency charged with collecting taxes employs 
people who don't pay their own taxes and that agency does nothing about 
it?
  Now, it doesn't stop there. The IRS has a slush fund of money it 
collects from fees that it uses however it wants. No accountability. No 
transparency.
  Meanwhile, about 500 IRS employees have been fired for misconduct, 
such as snooping on private taxpayers' information; yet, they have been 
hired back again.
  The IRS selectively targeted for sanctions taxpayers who donated to 
Romney, intimidated nonprofit citizen groups, and sent out millions in 
potentially fraudulent tax refunds all in the past few years alone. You 
wonder why American people don't trust their government.
  Now, Mr. Chairman, I urge Members to look at these bills on the 
floor. We are not trying to make some partisan statement here. We just 
want our government to work for the people and work well. But, to do 
that, we can't leave the IRS the way it has been.
  We had bills yesterday on the floor by Congressmen Jason Smith and 
David Rouzer that put an end to the slush funds and to make sure the 
people working at the IRS actually paid their taxes, and today we are 
going to pass more bills by Kristi Noem and Pat Meehan to stop the IRS 
from hiring people who can't be trusted and to fix the agency's 
absolutely terrible customer service.
  These are good bills. They are smart bills. Frankly, they are bills 
that make you wonder how any reasonable person could ever vote against 
them.
  But I forgot how irrational some people could be. Just a few days ago 
the Obama administration said they were against all four of these 
bills. Really?
  They are against accountability? They are against IRS agency 
employees paying their taxes? They want the IRS to fail to answer the 
vast majority of customer service calls? They want to rehire bad 
employees?
  I couldn't understand it. Frankly, the administration's statement 
didn't clear things up either. The Office of Management and Budget 
actually said this: ``These bills would impose unnecessary constraints 
on the Internal Revenue Service's . . . operations . . .''.
  Now, let me get one thing out of the way. The administration is 
worried about imposing constraints on the IRS, but it has no problem 
imposing constraints and regulations on small businesses, energy 
producers, manufacturers, to the point that it is driving them out of 
business.
  That shows you how backwards this administration's priorities are. 
The IRS targets conservative groups, fails at basic tasks, and employs 
people who don't pay their own taxes.
  But the people who are trying to earn an honest living and power 
their homes and produce products right here in America? The 
administration thinks they are the problem. They think they need to be 
regulated.
  That is wrong. That is not what our country stands for, and it is not 
what this majority is going to stand for either.
  But there is another principle here. The House is not trying to write 
some laws and impose some rules on the IRS just because.
  We are trying to restrain government because unaccountable and 
unelected bureaucrats have shown that they can't be trusted with the 
power they have been given.
  When you say ``IRS,'' I can assure you that the last words people 
think of are honest, fair, transparent, or even trustworthy.
  That is not how our government should be, especially the arm of 
government entrusted with collecting our taxes.
  Because when people can't trust that their government is treating 
them fairly, they lose faith in politics. They become cynical, and it 
increases the divisions within our country.
  Now, good government shouldn't be a one-party issue. I love the 
debates about how small or how large government should be or how high 
or how low taxes should be.
  But we can and we should agree that government should do its job well 
without abusing the trust of the American people. That should never be 
a one-party argument.
  That is what these bills are about. That is what this debate is 
about. The American people are watching, Mr. Chairman, and they want us 
to make our choice, good government or bad.
  Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may 
consume.
  Mr. Chairman, I have to respond to the previous speaker, whose 
simplistic analysis has been exposed during this Presidential election.
  We have selective memories. That is our problem, because how can you 
come before the American people, Mr. Chairman, and explain how X amount 
of IRS workers have not paid their taxes?
  We all want everybody to pay their taxes because when insufficient 
revenue is in the coffers, we can't pay our bills.
  But if the truth be known and we didn't have selective memory, when 
you point out how many people in the IRS of the 80,000 employees--
1,500--haven't paid their taxes or are in default of their taxes, the 
gentleman fails to mention that one of the biggest culprits in not 
paying their taxes is the very House of Representatives. My Lord. Five 
percent of the Members default on their taxes.
  Now, what about us and our responsibilities? We are the guardians. We 
are the guardians. We are the protectors of the taxpayers. Beware, 
taxpayers. Beware.
  I have a great deal of respect--and I hope I have proven it in the 
past--for the gentleman who has introduced this legislation, the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Meehan). I just think we are off on 
the wrong foot on this one.
  In your support for the bill, H.R. 4890, you claim to be concerned 
about IRS customer service. This bill would prohibit any bonuses being 
paid to IRS

[[Page H1908]]

employees until the agency comes up with a customer service strategy 
approved by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
  Customer service is critical. But how can you come here and complain 
about customer service when you have cut the IRS budget $1 billion in 
the last 5 years? That is 13,000 fewer full-time employees.
  At the same time--listen to this, Mr. Chairman--there have been 9 
million more tax returns being filed. Think about that just for a 
second: 9 million more tax returns, 13,000 fewer employees, $1 billion 
less in appropriations. I mean, that is not rocket science. It is 
simply arithmetic.
  Your budgets have consistently starved the IRS of the resources it 
needs to do its job, and, true to form, this bill expressly forbids any 
additional appropriations to carry out this mandate.
  Here is the reality. The IRS customer service didn't decline because 
of lazy employees. It declined because of significant budget cuts. This 
year, thanks to an extra $290 million in funding, it has rebounded to 
about mediocre, still a disservice to many Americans who need help.

  So I agree with the ranking member when he says to look in the mirror 
and you will see who is responsible.
  Instead of helping the struggling people of Puerto Rico or Flint, 
Michigan, or passing a budget--tax day passed a few days ago--this 
Congress is fiddling with weakening the IRS. You can't deny that all 
these attempts to harm the IRS are really harming taxpayers.
  Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Chairman, let me take a moment just to be responsive 
to a couple of things.
  In point of fact, I don't think that I could have had a better setup 
for the real issues here than the very arguments that have been made by 
my colleagues because, in fact, when you look behind what is actually 
going on, you see the scheme that is taking place here, which has put 
the IRS and the service that it gives to taxpayers right in the middle 
of the conflict.
  What they have done is created a circumstance in which, if you 
purposely starve the very thing that will relate to the taxpayers, you 
can get the taxpayers worked up to come back to scream for more money 
for the Service: Let's blame this on Congress.
  But let's talk about what is actually going on here, Mr. Chairman. 
There may have been budget cuts, as there have been budget cuts all 
across the government.
  One of the budget cuts related to the $50 million that the IRS has 
used for conferences. And so, just like every other agency in 
government, just like the 14 percent cut we have taken in our own 
offices, there have been cuts at a time in which our government doesn't 
have money.
  But that is not the issue. Because what has happened here has been 
the diverting of funding. What nobody is saying is that this same 
agency has been hit with $1.7 billion of diverted expenditure to 
service the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law that was pushed on 
us and pushed on all America; $1.7 billion has been diverted, will be 
dedicated this year, but never accounted for when that program was 
created.
  They put this responsibility, another unfunded mandate put on the 
agency by this law. What they have done is divert the attention. Take 
the resources away and then use it as a way to compel to see if we can 
force Congress to get pulled into this debate.
  Our thing is very, very simple. Again, it is not a funding issue. It 
is a service issue. We are not getting into that with this particular 
bill. It is a very simple thing that says: Create a plan for how you do 
it.
  I am glad that the gentleman from New Jersey, who I respect 
enormously, has been able, Mr. Chair, to touch on the very point that 
was also made, this idea that somehow we have been unresponsive and 
starved this agency. Mr. Chairman, $290 million just sent purposely for 
this issue, $290 million.
  So in addition to saying to give us a plan, we are saying: Here is 
$290 million of focused funding to say this is behind the plan. Tell us 
how you are going to use it.
  This whole thing is a smokescreen on the part of the other side to 
create the tension when, in fact, we are asking for a very simple thing 
that we have already funded.
  Mr. Chairman, I have no other speakers at this time.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  The Acting CHAIR (Mr. Kelly of Mississippi). The Committee will rise 
informally.
  The Speaker pro tempore (Mr. Holding) assumed the chair.

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