Taxpayer Assistance and Simplification Act of 2008
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
I thank my colleague from Georgia and thank him for his leadership on this important issue.
Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of this legislation, the Taxpayer Assistance and Simplification Act. It's a set of commonsense reforms designed to make the Tax Code a little more consumer friendly for hardworking Americans.
If the IRS has reason to believe that you've been a victim of identity theft, this bill says the IRS should let you know.
If you're entitled to an unclaimed refund, this bill empowers the IRS to do more to find you.
And if you need help with your taxes, this bill lets the IRS refer you to a qualified taxpayer clinic that can provide assistance.
So whether it's from eliminating nuisance paperwork to publicizing the earned income tax credit to clamping down on predatory ``refund anticipation loans,'' this bill, time and again, sides with the taxpayer.
I'm particularly pleased that it includes legislation many of us have worked on to end the practice of bounty hunting and terminate the program of contracting out the collection of taxes to private debt collectors.
Proponents of this program say it's necessary to close the tax gap. The facts just say they're wrong. The program, to date, hasn't returned a single dime of additional revenue to the U.S. Treasury. In fact, so far as we gather here today, it's been a revenue loser, an ideological driven black hole that has sucked $50 million out of the Treasury last year alone. And we would have been able to raise, and this is according to both Republican and IRS commissioners, we would have been able to raise $1.4 billion in revenue from people who hadn't paid taxes if we'd simply hired more IRS agents to do the job. And that's also the testimony of the National Taxpayer Advocate at the Department of Treasury. That's the person whose job it is to look out for the taxpayers, and she testified this is a bad deal for taxpayers. We should get rid of it.
And we shouldn't be surprised. We had a similar program in the 1990s that was ended because of abusive practices, and it failed to collect the money. Let's learn from history. Let's adopt this legislation.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source