Bob Kerrey: “These are two amendments on which I worked very closely with the chairman. They deal with two problems, one of which is…”

“These are two amendments on which I worked very closely with the chairman. They deal with two problems, one of which is a longstanding problem that we have had with the Internal Revenue Service, and that is how to deal with taxpayers who are willfully noncompliant. This requires the Commissioner to do a study of this issue and report back to the Finance Committee. Members need to understand, approximately the average for all taxpayers is nearly $1,600 per taxpayer for noncompliance, with penalty for willful noncompliance. The second amendment came as a consequence of a witness that we had in the hearings that the chairman held, Mr. Earl Epstein of Philadelphia. He was talking about putting teeth in the provision dealing with violations of fair debt collection practices. And at the chairman's suggestion, what we have asked for in this study is that the new Treasury inspector general for tax administration also look at this and provide Congress with a report, an annual report outlining any violations of the fair debt collection practices that we have included in this bill. Mr. Epstein notes, this is likely to result in better attention being paid to collection abuses as 'no Commissioner would be happy to report significant abuses, to say nothing of awards for damages [or] for failures to enforce proper authority over collection agents.' It is an important amendment.”