Another Bad Sign...

We have come a long way, and in the wrong direction, since the days when Republicans openly discussed abolishing the IRS.

In the Houston Chronicle, there is a report that the IRS is going to be auditing "the rich" more often. Remember that, thanks to inflation, $100,000.00 is not really all that much.

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Mark Everson has a message for wealthy Americans and U.S. corporations: After almost a decade of going easy on taxpayers, the tax collector is playing tough again.

The IRS has increased audits of those who earn more than $100,000 by 40 percent in the past two years, has begun examining companies' current tax bills instead of ones that are five or six years old and has taken aim at shelters.

Fantastic! Good thing the the GOP is in control!

Everson, 50, is a former airline catering executive and Reagan administration official who spent two years in President George W. Bush's White House. From the moment he was sworn in on June 11, 2003, Everson has tried to invigorate enforcement, which languished after Congress criticized the agency in a series of hearings in 1997 and 1998.

"There's been a recognition in this administration that this needs to be rebalanced, that you need to provide good service but you also need to enforce the law," Everson said.

The enforcement push is an about-face for the Republican Party, which rose to power in the 1990s partly by exploiting pollster Frank Luntz's observation that "nothing guarantees more applause and more support than the call to abolish the IRS."

I guess elephants do forget. Maybe we bloggers ought to help voters remember, come election time. And if the above isn't sufficient motivation, it might help to remember how "enforcement" is parsed in bureaucratese: "quotas."

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents most IRS workers, said some employees are concerned that Everson's emphasis on meeting enforcement goals will send the wrong message.

"The pendulum is swinging back to enforcement," Kelley said. "They are worried about it swinging back to quotas."

While quotas have long been illegal, the Senate hearings in 1997 and 1998 uncovered cases in which IRS employees received more favorable performance evaluations when they increased audits and collected more unpaid taxes.

This is in due in part to the nature of a bureaucracy and in part due to the mission of this bureaucracy in particular. In a bureaucracy, performance cannot normally be measured in terms of profit. But in the IRS, money is collected, and the gross amount of money is turned into a crude measure of performance, the quota. Unfortunately for us, the method of achieving optimal "performance" is the taking of money away from ordinary citizens by force. It doesn't take a genius to see that the minor matter of whether a given ordinary citizen actually "owes" the money might become a consideration of something less than the first order.

I've never been audited, but I did once get squeezed between the Naval bureaucracy and that of the IRS. The Navy goofed up my pay account, suddenly fixed the problem two years after I finally gave up trying to get it straightened out myself, and then reported a revised figure to the IRS. The IRS simply added the revised income to what the Navy reported the first time and sent me a huge bill and a very nasty letter. I had to hire a lawyer just to straighten the mess up. In the end, it turned out that they owed me money!

My story was amusing, but go here for a tiny peek at what things used to be like. (In more ways than one: when the IRS was the "American Gestapo" and when the Republicans were trying to protect us from them.)

The Internal Revenue Service was once again under fire on Capitol Hill Tuesday, as a Senate committee launched another round of hearings, this time focusing on alleged abuses of power inside the tax agency.

In the first of four days of testimony from taxpayers and agents, the Senate Finance Committee heard instances of the IRS stepping over the line, including stories of retaliation against whistleblowers and raids on taxpayers' homes that may not have been justified.

Unjustified raids on taxpayer homes?!? And let's also recall who conducted them.

Senators also heard of problems within the IRS workforce, as a senior IRS executive testified that whistleblowers at the agency can lose their jobs, while senior level managers often go unpunished.

Yvonne DesJardins, chief of the IRS employee and labor relations section who appeared as a surprise witness on the hearings' opening day, said, "The whistleblowers are ostracized and careers destroyed and those senior officials who engaged in the misconduct which was reported and substantiated are not only protected from receiving any disciplinary actions, but are often times rewarded [emphasis mine]during the same year the misconduct occurs. Again, I speak from personal experience."

The prospect of a return to tax collection quotas plus the complete lack of accountability within the IRS bureaucracy make this most recent Republican reversal quite ominous indeed. Daily Pundit should update his list to an even dozen.

-- CAV