Federal Employee Tax Accountability Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, the ranking member said this was a bill to solve a nonexistent problem. Everybody ought to pay their taxes--everybody. Everybody ought to pay their taxes. Now, if you are really rich, you can find an accountant who can find you about every loophole there is that we have given. You want to have a bill on the floor closing loopholes.

The chairman admits that Federal employees pay their taxes voluntarily and correctly at a higher percentage than the general public. Should every one of them pay? Should it be 100 percent? The chairman is right; it should be 100 percent.

The gentleman from North Carolina talks about our Federal employees, and they ought to be treated correctly. We are their board of directors. I will tell you, folks, if any board of directors of any large corporation in America treated its employees the way we treat them, they would all quit, and the company would go bankrupt, because we treat our Federal employees very poorly--very poorly.

The general public, of course, thinks they are loafing and they are not working hard and this, that, and the other, and that is wrong. We have the best civil service in the world.

This does convey the message that somehow you are not doing what you are supposed to do. I know the gentleman gets up and says this is a very small percentage. When a Member of Congress doesn't pay his taxes and he gets indicted and he has to quit this body, it besmirches all of us.

The gentleman from Maryland is absolutely correct. It has not been mentioned, but there is a provision in law that allows the IRS to go in and take the salary of Federal employees. That is what the gentleman is talking about. Unlike the private sector, where you have to go through a lot of rigmarole--properly so, to protect the taxpayer--the Federal employee is subjected to the IRS having special authority going and taking part of their salary.

Now, by the way, this mentions Federal employees. I don't know whether the ranking member knows the answer to this, but are Members of Congress included in that definition? The answer? The gentleman is shaking his head, saying no. Yet the Congress as an institution has a lower rate of paying, some 95 percent as opposed to 97 percent, of Federal employees.

What is this all about? This is about, frankly, saying government is bad and the people who work for them aren't so hot either. Now, I don't think the gentleman from Utah thinks that is the message. I understand that. The gentleman is my friend. I like him. He is a bright and able fellow. But that is the message we are sending. It's a bad message.

I will tell you, I represent 62,000 Federal employees, and I tell all of them and all the unions, if they are not performing their job, if they are watching television 4 hours a day, they ought to be fired. I will support the gentleman in that effort because we ought to demand performance, and that is why we have, in the IRS Code, you can take the salary if they are not paying their taxes. That is not true of any other employee in America. You have got to go through a legal process, et cetera, et cetera, as you should.

So I would urge my colleagues to defeat this bill, as we did in the last Congress on suspension, and yes, tell all of our employees, ``You need to pay your taxes,'' and make sure if they don't, IRS gets their fees; and if they are not performing their task and it undermines their performance, then we ought to subject them, just as every other employee, to being removed, but not simply to say, arbitrarily, this employee, these employees, our employees, America's employees, will be treated more harshly than the American people and the American workers around this country are treated. Treat them the same. That is fair. That is what they hope for.

We shut down government for 16 days, sent our employees home. The gentleman from North Carolina talked about there are some bad circumstances for some people: they have got to pay a mortgage payment or a rent payment or a car payment or a college tuition. We sent them home and we said: We are not paying you. We came back later and we said: Oh, no, we are going to pay you. But we caused them a great deal of angst.

I will tell you this: that is not the way to treat people. We didn't send them home because we didn't have the money to pay for them. We didn't send them home because America was bankrupt. We sent them home because we disagreed with a policy the President was pursuing or we wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, over which they had no control. But we sent them home without pay. Very frankly, those who were critical employees we kept working, but we didn't pay them. What way is that to run any organization, much less the greatest country on the face of the Earth?

I urge my colleagues, show respect and fairness to those who work for our country in the civil service of our country. Reject this legislation. Vote ``no.''

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