Providing for Consideration of H.R. Ban on IRS Bonuses Until Secretary of the Treasury Develops Comprehensive Customer Service Strategy, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. Ensuring Integrity in the IRS Workforce Act of 2015

Floor Speech

(Mr. McGOVERN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in very strong opposition to this rule, which provides for consideration of H.R. 4890, under a structured process, and H.R. 3724, under a completely closed process. These two pieces of legislation are part of the House majority's effort this week to micromanage the IRS and undermine its ability to enforce our tax laws.

This is not a serious attempt at legislating. These bills are press releases. Let's be honest. They are press releases for my friends in the majority to use on the campaign trail, and they are serving as a distraction from the business the Republican leadership has failed to act upon.

Last Friday, House Republicans missed the legally mandated deadline for Congress to enact a budget, and it appears as though we are not going to see a budget resolution on the floor this week--or anytime soon. It is pretty sad that Speaker Ryan, a former Budget Committee chairman himself, can't get the House to pass a budget.

In 2011, Speaker Ryan said that failing to enact a budget is a ``historic failure to fulfill one of the most basic responsibilities of governing.'' In 2012, the Speaker went on to say that not passing a budget ``has serious consequences for American families.''

But the extreme budget proposed by the Republican leadership--a budget that would end the Medicare guarantee, gut antipoverty programs, and demand $6.5 trillion in cuts--was not extreme enough for House Republicans, so they can't get a majority within their ranks. This is a failure of the majority to do its job, plain and simple.

Demands by a vocal group of conservative Members to abandon a bipartisan agreement reached last year on spending caps has put a budget in jeopardy and the promise of regular order for the appropriations process out of reach. Don't be surprised if all these spending bills get crammed in during a lame duck session after voters have cast their ballots and we have this big monstrosity that comes before the Congress--nobody knows what is in it--and it gets passed. That is the way the business of this House will proceed. I don't think that is what the American people want; and if you want to talk about what makes the American people shake their heads, it is that.

Forgive me if I find it ironic that we are here today telling the IRS how to do its job while this Republican majority can't even do its job of passing a budget and fulfilling its most basic responsibility of governing.

So if my Republican friends don't want to pass a budget, there are other important things we can do besides these message bills that are going nowhere:

Negotiations have stalled on legislation to help Puerto Rico avoid a default. We could do that.

A bill to provide aid to families in Flint, Michigan, has not reached the floor for a vote. Clearly, I think everybody in this country was horrified when they learned of the fact that the residents of Flint, Michigan, were being poisoned by the water that was coming out of their faucets. We could do something about that, but we are not.

A bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the U.S. Senate has been blocked by the leadership in this House for the past 3 years. We could actually fix our immigration laws rather than just complain about them, but we are not going to do that, I guess, either.

I might also suggest to my friends that, if they need bills to consider on the floor, we could respond to the thousands and thousands of constituents from all over the country that have been rallying at the Capitol during the past week as part of the Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening movements and take up legislation to reform our campaign finance system. Let's do something about getting the money out of politics. Let's remove the influence that special interests have on congressional elections--and all elections--because of our broken campaign finance laws. We could do that, but we are not. We are doing messaging bills that are going nowhere.

We could join millions of our constituents and people across the globe in celebrating Earth Day by considering climate change legislation. I know that may be a heavy lift on my Republican friends, because a big chunk of the Republican Conference doesn't even believe that climate change is an issue.

We could do tax reform. Let's simplify the Tax Code. Let's remove all these loopholes that allow big corporations to escape paying taxes while regular, hardworking people have to pay taxes. Let's do tax reform. That would be a good thing to do during this week, but we are not going to do that.

And perhaps we can maybe debate an AUMF, an Authorization for Use of Military Force, something that I have been urging this place to do for a long, long time now. Yesterday, the Pentagon announced hundreds more U.S. forces will be deployed in Iraq. We are getting sucked into this war even more deeply. I think people are tired of endless wars. Our troops are expected to perform their responsibilities when we send them to places like Iraq and Syria, but why aren't we expected to do our job and actually debate these issues and vote on them? Instead, we are silent; we are indifferent.

So we have a lot that we can do. Unfortunately, we are not doing any of those things. This place is becoming a Chamber where trivial issues are debated passionately and important ones not at all. We need to do better, and we need to start coming together and figuring out how to solve some of these problems.

H.R. 3724, which is unnecessary at best, prohibits the IRS Commissioner from rehiring any former employee that was terminated for misconduct, even though there are already processes in place to ensure employees with significant performance or conduct problems are not rehired. This legislation is not even necessary.

H.R. 4890 prevents the Treasury Department from paying bonuses to IRS employees until the Secretary submits to Congress a customer service strategy that has been approved by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Again, an added layer of bureaucracy.

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record a letter sent to all Members of Congress from The National Treasury Employees Union, which is opposed to H.R. 4890 and a number of the other bills that we are debating here today. The National Treasury Employees Union, April 12, 2016.

Dear Representative: As President of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), representing over 150,000 federal employees in 31 agencies, including the men and women at the IRS, I am writing to express opposition to several bills scheduled to be considered by the House Committee on Ways and Means on April 13. NTEU believes all of these bills would weaken IRS' ability to carry out their taxpayer service and enforcement missions, and undermine efforts to retain dedicated and experienced employees.

H.R. 4885, the ``IRS Oversight While Eliminating Spending (OWES) Act of 2016,'' would require IRS collected user fees to be deposited in the general fund of the U.S. Treasury and would prevent the IRS from spending the user fees ``unless provided by an appropriations act.'' NTEU strongly opposes eliminating IRS' ability to use the user fees that it collects, as provided by law. The IRS charges user fees for various services: to assist taxpayers in complying with their tax liabilities; to clarify the application of the tax code to particular circumstances; and to ensure the quality of paid preparers of tax returns, among others. While user fees have historically been used, in large part, to fund traditional taxpayer service activities, recent budget cuts in excess of $900 million since Fiscal Year (FY) 2010 have forced the IRS to reallocate a greater portion of these user fees to implement a number of significant legislative mandates, nearly all of which came with no additional funding. These include the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FACTA), and the Achieving a Better Life Experience (ABLE) Act.

While proponents of this legislation claim the bill is simply an attempt to ensure proper congressional oversight of the IRS, in reality these measures are designed to undermine and weaken the IRS's ability to enforce enacted laws. While NTEU takes no position as to whether any particular tax statutory provisions remain or are repealed, NTEU believes it is important to remember that the IRS, and its personnel, are charged with implementing each and every tax law passed by Congress, including the ACA. Therefore, it is imperative that the IRS be provided with the resources necessary to carry out its responsibilities under the law, and to retain the flexibility to allocate user fee revenues as necessary to do so.

Prohibiting the IRS from accessing the roughly $400 million in user fees it collects each year is effectively an immediate cut of $400 million to its budget, and will simply force the IRS to divert resources from other critical taxpayer service and enforcement programs to carry out its statutory mandates.

NTEU also urges you to oppose H.R. 1206, the ``No Hires for the Delinquent IRS Act'' which would prohibit the hiring of additional IRS employees until the Secretary of the Treasury certifies that no employee of the IRS has a seriously delinquent tax debt.

While NTEU believes that each and every IRS employee should pay their taxes in full and on time, we have serious concerns about how the bill defines a seriously delinquent tax debt, and believe basing IRS' ability to hire additional personnel on such an uncertain standard is unjustified, and will only further undermine its ability to meet its taxpayer service and enforcement missions.

Under H.R. 1206, a tax debt is considered ``seriously delinquent'' by the filing of a notice of a federal tax lien (NFTL). Unfortunately, using notice of a lien as an indication a debt is seriously delinquent is inappropriate since it is not a final determination of tax liability. Section 6321 of the Internal Revenue Code establishes that a lien can be filed immediately upon the assessment of tax. In many instances, the IRS may file an NFTL to simply secure the government's future potential interest and establish its priority as a possible creditor in competition with other creditors. Therefore, the filing of the NFTL is not a true indication that a tax debt is ``seriously delinquent.''

In addition, it is unclear why this legislation is even necessary. The bill specifically singles out the tax status of employees at the IRS who have an overall tax compliance rate of over 99%, the highest in the federal government, and a much higher compliance rate than the general public. Furthermore, for those employees at the IRS that do have tax debts, the existing Federal Payment Levy Program already allows the IRS to levy federal salaries to recover federal tax debts.

We also believe restricting the IRS' ability to hire qualified applicants based upon an uncertain tax status standard of its employees is misguided, and will simply further impede its ability to provide quality services to American taxpayers. The IRS workforce has been reduced by more than 15,000 employees over the past five years, including many front-line customer service and enforcement personnel. Therefore, it is critical that the IRS have the ability to hire additional personnel to provide the services taxpayers expect and to implement the laws passed by Congress.

Finally, NTEU urges you to oppose H.R. 4890 which would prohibit the IRS from paying performance awards to its employees until the Secretary of the Treasury develops and implements a comprehensive customer service strategy. NTEU believes this legislation is unnecessary, and will only serve to undermine IRS efforts to retain experienced employees that provide many of the critical taxpayer services. In fact, the IRS has already recently provided a detailed and comprehensive strategy to improve taxpayer services, and in particular, the phone level of service, as part of its FY 2017 budget request. However, implementation of this strategy will require a commitment by Congress to provide the IRS with the necessary resources and staffing. If members are serious about helping the IRS meet its mission of providing taxpayers with top quality service in a timely manner, Congress will fund the Administration's FY 2017 IRS budget request.

Furthermore, this measure is unfairly punitive to hard- working front-line employees who are not responsible for developing or implementing agency-wide policies and strategies, and who have already experienced significant pay hardships in recent years--stemming from the three-year pay freeze and furlough days, followed by three years of minuscule pay increases, and performance awards below one percent of their salaries. Like all federal agencies and effective employers, the IRS must be able to properly compensate its workforce, particularly at a time of a healthy job market, and to distinguish and reward higher performing employees.

For these reasons, we strongly urge you to oppose these bills during committee consideration on Wednesday, April 13. Please contact Matt Socicnat of my staff if you have any questions. Sincerely, Anthony M. Reardon, National President.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, if the majority is concerned with customer service at the IRS, we should be considering appropriations legislation to fully fund the administration's budget request for the agency. IRS funding has been slashed by nearly $1 billion since 2010, and as a result, the IRS had to cut 12,000 jobs, reduce employee training, and delay technology updates. So while I understand that my friends on the other side of the aisle don't like the IRS, it is their demands for steep funding cuts that have led directly to a degradation of customer service during the past several years.

Furthermore, the IRS has already developed and has begun to implement a strategy to improve taxpayer services, and here is the deal, Mr. Speaker. If this were really an issue, we could have brought this up at any time. We could come together and try to see whether we can work on bipartisan legislation, but instead, we bring up legislation attacking the IRS during the week that people have to pay their taxes. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that this is all about messaging and not about substance.

I think that people in this country are really sick and tired of the performance of this Congress--or the lack of performance of this Congress. We have a lot of challenges that we need to confront; we have a lot of problems that we need to solve; and rather than doing this, we ought to be doing the people's business. We ought to be legislating in a serious way and leave these press releases and these messaging bills for the Republican congressional campaign committee. It is beneath, I think, the standards that this Congress should uphold.

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Mr. McGOVERN. We have no speakers because everybody is so interested in this legislation that I think they would prefer to stay in their offices.

Let me just say, Mr. Speaker, I am going to urge my colleagues to defeat the previous question. If we do, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up Mr. Van Hollen's bill that would restrict American companies' use of so-called tax inversions to shrink their tax obligations by hiding money in foreign countries. The bill would direct the money toward repairing our crumbling infrastructure.

That is exactly the type of legislation we ought to be debating here: something that is meaningful to the American people and to get American corporations that are trying to not pay their fair share to pay their fair share and to invest in repairing our crumbling infrastructure, whether it be water infrastructure that we see in such disrepair in places like Flint, Michigan, or our roads and bridges. Where I come from in Massachusetts, we have bridges that are older than most of your States, and they need repair.

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Mr. McGOVERN. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' and defeat the previous question and to vote ``no'' on the rule.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

A recorded vote was ordered.

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