IRS Oversight While Eliminating Spending (OWES) Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, Monday, as all Americans know, was, of course, Tax Day. Today should be officially designated as ``Republican Tax Distraction Day'' because that is exactly what is going on here.

Rather than address the many inequities and complexities in our tax system, Republicans distract by attacking the tax collector, which is one of the oldest tactics around that goes back, I guess, many civilizations.

I believe it was Mark Twain who suggested the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector is that the taxidermist only takes your skin.

The problem we have today is that there are many of our largest and most profitable corporations that don't have any skin in the game.

For the patriotic taxpayers that were out there last weekend trying to figure out how they would complete their taxes and how they would make the payments or who were lined up on Monday night at the post office to make their payments--those taxpayers have a lot of boxes on their tax form, but they don't have one that they can check that shifts their income off to some offshore tax haven. They can't decide that they will just defer paying on some of their income until they feel like it.

Yet, some of America's largest and most profitable companies use just these type of tax loopholes to dramatically lower their tax bill. These Republicans, especially on the House Ways and Means Committee, have shown no interest in addressing the problem whatsoever.

Only last week a major development before this Republican tax development was a report that found that 20 percent of large, profitable corporations paid no Federal income tax in 2012, the last year of the survey.

That is no. That is none. That is zero. That is zilch. It is not what those folks that were working last weekend trying to figure out their taxes were faced with, but it is what is occurring.

If Republicans were serious about making the Internal Revenue Service work better, they would be addressing injustices like this instead of making it worse by slashing the IRS budget. Shorting that budget is short-circuiting the collection of taxes from all those people that are out there trying to dodge their taxes.

Under these Republican budgets, almost one in four of the enforcement tax staff at the IRS have been eliminated over the last 7 years. Every additional dollar that we spend on tax enforcement yields an estimated $4 in increased revenue.

Even a remarkable return on investment like that is modest compared to the return that America's largest corporations are getting by lobbying this Congress and participating in the political process. Oxfam America this month reported that tax dodging by multinationals is costing the United States perhaps as much as $111 billion each year.

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, recovering that revenue could pay for the entire budget of The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Education.

Tax dodging is not a victimless crime. It is like those seaside resorts where you hear: Grandpa went to the Caymans and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

Well, you don't get a T-shirt out of this kind of tax dodging, but you do get a tax bill, because the hardworking American families and small businesses that are picking up the tab for all of those loopholes are having to pay more than their fair share.

What we should be doing on this Republican Tax Distraction Day is getting about those loopholes and seeing that the IRS enforces our laws fairly and equitably. That is not being done today.

This and the rest of this package should be rejected in favor of a system that is fair to all Americans.

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