Todd Tiahrt: “some people think it is not fair to pick on the IRS so much. But when we think about all the people whose lives were…”

“some people think it is not fair to pick on the IRS so much. But when we think about all the people whose lives were turned upside down because of an honest mistake or an audit, our outrage might resurface with even greater force. Americans could probably be divided into those who have experienced IRS abuse or incompetence and those who have not. And it would be interesting to see how many are in each group. Mr. Speaker, listen to this horror story: Because of a printing error, about a million taxpayers could mail their returns to the IRS and see them sent right back to the sender. Hard to file a return on time when that happens. It turns out that there was a computer error on the stick-on address labels that are used for processing. The IRS bar code tells the computer to take poor Mr. Taxpayer's form and send it right back to him. Of course, in fairness we could say that that mistake was a simple bureaucratic snafu or an isolated instance or we could note that this is an all-too-common IRS blunder and simply more evidence of business as usual at the IRS.”