Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this important hearing today.
Mr. Commissioner, thank you for being here today and congratulations to you and your staff on a successful filing season.
Last week, we passed seven bipartisan bills on the House floor; all focused on improving IRS' operations. Now is the time for Congress to ensure that the agency has the resources it needs to properly serve American taxpayers. And just like last week, I hope that it will be a bipartisan effort.
Taxpayers are struggling through no fault of their own. This Committee and this Congress must do more to increase and expand taxpayer services.
Unfortunately, during this filing season, taxpayers finally felt the pain of the Republicans’ $1.2 billion dollar cut to the agency’s budget. The IRS' budget is now less than it was six years ago.
Taxpayer service this filing season was terrible. This was not the fault of hardworking IRS employees. National Public Radio (NPR) recently ran a story called “IRS Budget Cuts Make for a Nightmarish Filing Season." Taxpayers seeking assistance from the IRS waited in lines for hours. Only four in ten taxpayers, who called the agency, were able to talk to a customer service representative.
The NBC WXIA local station in Atlanta reported that thousands of people waited for hours to get answers to their questions at the IRS Atlanta regional office. In Georgia, the National Treasury Employees Union said the wait times were a result of federal budget cuts. The union said that Georgia has lost nearly 1,900 IRS employees since 2011.
Sadly, taxpayers faced the same challenges across the country. According to press reports, in New York, one Internal Revenue Service office even ran out of paper to print extra tax forms after taxpayers waited in long lines for hours. The union said that New York has lost nearly 1,200 IRS employees since 2011.
This is not right. This is not fair. This is not just. Taxpayers should not suffer to further the Republican agenda.
The Majority says the budget cuts are a result of the IRS investigation into the processing of tax-exempt applications. This investigation started nearly two years ago-in May 2013. The agency has spent more than $20 million to produce more than 1,300,000 pages of documents, including 78,000 emails from Ms. Lois Lerner. To this day, there has not been one shred of evidence produced to support the Republican claim that the processing of applications was politically motivated or intended to target the President’s political enemies. The Inspector General even stated that no one outside of the agency was involved in setting the standards for processing tax-exempt applications.
It is time to put political agendas aside and work together to provide this agency with the resources it needs to improve taxpayer service and collect revenue. I ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to join me in this effort.
Thank you.
