Kenny Hulshof: “I accept the invitation of the preceding speaker to go beyond the rhetoric and talk about the outrages. Mr. Speaker, let…”

“I accept the invitation of the preceding speaker to go beyond the rhetoric and talk about the outrages. Mr. Speaker, let not my words today be an indictment against the hard-working men and women that are our tax collectors that are trying to do the best job they can. But as a Member of the House Committee on Ways and Means, particularly the Subcommittee on Oversight, we have the responsibility of looking at the inner workings of the Internal Revenue Service, and here are some of the examples we have seen already this calendar year. Earlier this year, we learned that over 100 IRS agents conducted unauthorized inspections of individual taxpayer records. Example No. 2: The IRS delayed its notification to business owners of a new requirement to electronically file payroll taxes, and then the agency threatened these same business owners with severe sanctions for noncompliance. Example No. 3: The error and fraud rate in one program alone, the earned income credit, is nearly 21 percent. Five billion dollars were erroneously paid out of tax money last year alone. If these examples of mismanagement are not troubling enough, they pale in comparison to a recent Associated Press story that hit the newspapers in Missouri, and that is that the IRS is now targeting the victims of the great flood of 1993 with audits of these individual taxpayers who cannot document their losses because receipts were washed away in the flood.”