Ron Wyden

Let us, for purposes of discussion--Ms. Olson, is there anything Mr. Shay just said on that point that you would take exception with?

Thank you, Senator Schumer. It sounds very encouraging that Senator Schumer and Senator Portman are making some real headway.

I very much share your view that a competitive rate is essential as part of this.

It is legislative malpractice to sit by and let this situation fester.

We are going to work in a bipartisan way on this.

Our end goals are bipartisan: a tax code that supercharges American competitiveness in tough global markets.

The broken U.S. tax code hurts America's competitiveness around the world, how that tax code is hindering the drive to create what I call red, white, and blue jobs that pay strong middle-class wages.

The one that's hitting my home state of Oregon hardest is the fake phone call demanding money or personal information on behalf of the IRS.

What's new is, they're now stealing Americans' identities and personally threatening them on an industrial scale, while directly robbing them of their hard-earned money.

Since the day the IRS opened its doors, scam artists have been hatching up slick new ways of stealing taxpayer dollars from the Treasury.

I mean, we have millions of older people in this country who are walking an economic tightrope every single day.

I would also really like to see the IRS take a greater leadership role in terms of driving many of the standards or expectations.

Without compromising the investigation, can you tell us a little bit--you said there were some problems in working with the foreign governments. Can you just give us a little bit of a sense of what those are?

Let us move on to the Anthem case, because this is one that really shows the industrial scale of these incredible rip-offs, something like 80 million people affected by cyber-ID theft.

It seems to me--and you mentioned it in your testimony--it is clear that the phone scams, a lot of them, are originating overseas.

What is new is, the rip-off artists are now stealing Americans' identities and personally threatening them on an industrial scale.

I look forward to working with you and our colleagues on this in a bipartisan way.

In my view, part of the challenge is getting the States' Internet tax services and the IRS on the same wavelength.

So the real question is, what is it going to take to root it out and get the bad actors on the sidelines--more prosecutions, stronger deterrence, more cops on the beat?

Our colleague Senator Nelson is also a leader on this issue of keeping taxpayers safe from identity theft and fraud.

The one that is hitting Oregonians hardest is the fake phone call demanding money or personal information on behalf of the IRS.

It is incredibly important.

It's a whole lot harder to use the code to your advantage if you're a middle-class individual...

Suffice it to say, there is kind of a bundle of these tax provisions that eliminate a substantial amount of investment risk, and the people who can take advantage of it pay half the tax rate.

There is a need to coordinate the various education incentives in order to simplify these provisions