Steve Rothman: “Can I first say a couple of things? I want to first thank Congressman Meek and yourself, my dear friend Congressman…”

“Can I first say a couple of things? I want to first thank Congressman Meek and yourself, my dear friend Congressman Delahunt. We started out in Congress 9\1/2\ years ago. We are delighted to welcome this very bright young man who is now a veteran Congressman. I represent, I suppose, the 50-somethings. I know, Bill, you are probably still 30-something. But I have been watching you young people, and Ms. Wasserman Schultz and others, and I have always been jumping up at my television saying, gee, I wish I had the time to add my voice. Well, something happened yesterday, gentlemen, and Mr. Speaker, that so outraged me that I had to come to the floor to speak about it. Actually, it was this past week. We had the commissioner of the IRS, Mr. Everson, before us. He announced that he was going to, according to the President's policy, in order to collect some taxes that were acknowledged to be due by the taxpayers, the IRS is now going to hire private collection firms to collect the taxes of United States citizens. It gets worse. Private tax collecting firms collecting taxes due by United States citizens to the IRS are going to charge up to 25 percent commission. A 25 percent commission. So for every dollar they collect from the taxpayer, they are going to keep 25 cents. Now, what is interesting is, I asked certain questions and I discovered that a Federal employee in the Internal Revenue Service who collects taxes, their overhead is about 5 cents on the dollar.…”