The IRS Leaves Money on the Table

Remember all those cuts the Republicans demanded? Among them was a big one to cut back the IRS budget. That’s costing us billions of dollars that the IRS doesn’t have the staff to collect.
by Charlie Leck

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world isn’t it? I remember someone from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) warning the Congress last year that the cuts they were pushing through on the IRS would end up costing more in federal income than the cuts themselves would save. It appears that those projections are true. The IRS may be failing to collect billions of dollars of unpaid taxes because it hasn’t the staff and resources to do it.

I got the above information from an AARP Bulletin. It appears to be well enough documented (see below) and the IRS doesn’t deny it. As a matter of fact, IRS officials “acknowledge the problem.”

“Budget cuts can lead to noticeable degradation of IRS efforts involving both taxpayer service and tax enforcement and can have a lasting impact on the nation’s voluntary tax compliance.”

If some of you out there are documentation and source freaks, you can read this testimony by Nina B. Olson, a federal tax expert, before the Congress last year. She outlines the difficulties the IRS is having and estimates that we may be losing billions of dollars as a result.

This is one of the cuts that Republicans insisted on in last year’s budget squabble with the Democrats! Does anyone want to suggest that maybe the Republicans don’t want so many IRS agents running around trying to collect money owed the government? Not me!

BTW (I'm getting into these texting abbreviations now), I'm not a big fan of the AARP (the American Association of Retired People). It's too big and deals with too, too much money. Terrible things happen when there's that much money involved in a supposed non-profit. Just ask the Susan B. Komen Race for a Cure Foundation. For starters, the AARP makes an incredible amount of money on the insurance it sells to members. It's difficult to tell whether the insurance sales side of AARP comes before service to its members. The AARP has a very strong lobbying program that always seems to be lobbying for benefits that will profit its own insurance services and income rather than for benefits for older and retired Americans. They took a terribly wrong stand on prescription benefits in Medicare under the Bush administration and were primarily responsible for getting some bad legislation passed that has hurt retired folks ever since.

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