Geo wrote:

Chuck Feney wrote:

Surprise! More (crooked) government contractors with your Social
Security number on their laptops. Only an administration of criminals
could make the same pretend "errors" over and over and over....

I found this part of the article to be the funniest: ''But the
government would probably net $1.1 billion from private debt collectors
over 10 years, compared with the $87 billion that could be reaped if
the agency hired more revenue officers, as Mr. Rossotti had
recommended.''

Only the fed govt could possibly complain that 150,000 plus employees
is not enough to get the job done.

On Sun, 20 Aug 2006, Harry Hope <rivrvu@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

One of the three companies selected by the I.R.S. is a law firm in
Austin, Tex., where a former partner, Juan Peña, admitted in 2002 that
he paid bribes to win a collection contract from the city of San
Antonio.

He went to jail for the crime.

Last month the same law firm, Linebarger Goggan Blair & Sampson, was
again in the news.

One of its competitors, Municipal Services Bureau, also of Austin,
sued Brownsville, Tex., charging that the city improperly gave the
Linebarger firm a collections contract that it suggested was
influenced by campaign contributions to two city commissioners.

Joe Householder, a spokesman for Linebarger, which specializes in
delinquent tax collections, said it had resolved the issues raised by
the Peña case in 2002 and that it believed it had acted properly in
Brownsville.

The mayor of Brownsville, Eddie Treviño Jr., said that the contract
vote had been unanimous and scoffed at the accusations of misconduct.

The two other companies that have won debt collection contracts from
the I.R.S. are Pioneer Credit Recovery of Arcade, N.Y., a division of
the SLM Corporation, and the CBE Group of Waterloo, Iowa.

The main objection so far to the privatization program is that it is
more expensive than internal collection.

"I freely admit it," Mark W. Everson, the tax commissioner, told a
House of Representatives committee in March.

Privatizing government services is often promoted as a way to cut
costs.

But the government would probably net $1.1 billion from private debt
collectors over 10 years, compared with the $87 billion that could be
reaped if the agency hired more revenue officers, as Mr. Rossotti had
recommended.

Taxpayer rights are at risk with privatization, Nina B. Olson, the
I.R.S. taxpayer advocate, warned Congress earlier this year.

"Because private collectors will operate under rules of profit
maximization rather than the I.R.S.'s customer-service based policy,"
she warned, the private collectors may have less incentive to
safeguard taxpayer rights.

Al Cleland, a retired I.R.S. tax collector in Minnesota, predicted
that using private collectors would cause some debtors to owe more.

"We always told people to get current on their taxes first, so they
would not have more penalties added, and then work on paying off their
back taxes," Mr. Cleland said.

"A private collection agency has no incentive to tell taxpayers that,
so people will pay more penalties."

From The New York Times, 8/20/06:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/business/20tax.html?_r=1&ei=5094&en=c9462e925e79e193&hp=&ex=1156046400&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1156004435-2A7duGmhsnJV6PVK13Sp/w&oref=slogin

I.R.S. Enlists Help in Collecting Delinquent Taxes

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

If you owe back taxes to the federal government, the next call asking
you to pay may come not from an Internal Revenue Service officer, but

from a private debt collector.

Within two weeks, the I.R.S. will turn over data on 12,500 taxpayers
-- each of whom owes $25,000 or less in back taxes -- to three
collection agencies.

Larger debtors will continue to be pursued by I.R.S. officers.

The move, an initiative of the Bush administration, represents the
first step in a broader plan to outsource the collection of smaller
tax debts to private companies over time.

Although I.R.S. officials acknowledge that this will be much more
expensive than doing it internally, they say that Congress has forced
their hand by refusing to let them hire more revenue officers, who
could pull in a lot of easy-to-collect money.

The private debt collection program is expected to bring in $1.4
billion over 10 years, with the collection agencies keeping about $330
million of that, or 22 to 24 cents on the dollar.

By hiring more revenue officers, the I.R.S. could collect more than $9
billion each year and spend only $296 million -- or about three cents
on the dollar -- to do so, Charles O. Rossotti, the computer systems
entrepreneur who was commissioner from 1997 to 2002, told Congress
four years ago.

I.R.S. officials on Friday characterized those figures as correct, but
said that the plan Mr. Rossotti had proposed had been forestalled by
Congress, which declined to authorize it to hire more revenue
officers.

Critics of the privatization plan point not only to the higher cost
but also to what they say is a greater potential for abuse.

With private companies in the mix, they say, debtors could more easily
be tricked into paying money to scam artists using spoof Web sites or
other schemes, a problem the I.R.S. alerted taxpayers to in April.

_________________________________________________________

Another Republican boondoggle.

Harry

I agree

However, the IRS is loved by DemoRATS and Niggers so they can steal the
white man's money and redistribute it

The IRS should be eliminated and a consumer tax placed on goods

Why does the Government get first crack at my paycheck?

Why are most IRS employees Black or Homosexual?

I wonder why