Federal Employee Tax Accountability Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. I thank my good friend for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, let's put in context what is happening on this floor today. This is tax day, and what the majority does each tax day is pull out tax bills. Some of them are good bills; some of them have the appearance of everything but the kitchen sink.

There are some Members of their party who are running for President on abolishing the IRS. Well, you can't abolish it; so what they are doing is targeting working people in the Federal Government to point out that Republicans are not asleep on tax day.

What the Republican majority is doing today is a gratuitous, useless, slap in the face of Federal employees who apparently do understand that they have an affirmative duty, even beyond others, to pay their taxes because they do so at a rate that is almost twice that of the general public which is more than twice that of other Americans.

The best that can be said about this bill is that it is entirely superfluous. It does what already can be done. What can be done is this: existing statutory authority gives the Federal Government, the IRS, the ability to collect Federal, State, and local taxes from all Federal employees.

If federal agencies find that there is a delinquent taxpayer, they can already, under Federal law, go from counseling to removal for all Federal employees. That is in the law already, my friends.

In their wisdom, Congresses in the past have wanted to keep Federal employees paying their taxes until they paid them off, so Congress didn't cut off its nose to spite its face by taking away their jobs as this bill allows.

They tried something that has worked, the Federal Employee/Retiree Delinquency Initiative, which matches up Federal employees in all the agencies, not just the IRS, with delinquencies so they have their very low delinquency rate today.

The IRS also can levy past the usual limit of 15 percent until the government gets all its money. The IRS have the discretion to do this for all Federal employees, not only IRS employees.

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