Bob Kerrey: “I can say that one of the things that we have done with this legislation is to make the taxpayer advocate more…”

“I can say that one of the things that we have done with this legislation is to make the taxpayer advocate more independent. Very often that is what is missing. Let's say that you are one of the 135,000, or you are one of the 270,000 since we have asked for this bill to be taken up, who get a notice and you disagree with that notice. There is a dispute resolution officer who works for the taxpayer advocate that you can call up. You can say, ``Look, I have a dispute here. I think it is unfair. I would like to come in and talk to you.'' There is a mechanism under the Taxpayer Bill of Rights II to do that. And what we do is make that taxpayer advocate even more independent. Very often what happens is the law requires the revenue agent to collect, even though the revenue agents say this doesn't make any sense. There is no mechanism that enables the revenue agent to be overruled. What we do is, by giving that taxpayer advocate more independence and more power and more authority to overrule, I think we are going to reduce substantially the number of cases where a person looks at it and says, ``My gosh, why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars to collect 100 bucks, or something like that?''”