Recovering Missing Children Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Pascrell for yielding time, and I thank my good friend and colleague Erik Paulsen for his great work in getting us to this point today where finally we are going to move this measure forward.
It is almost 5 years to the day that Mr. Paulsen and I introduced this legislation, along with a number of others, in 2011, to deal with this really, just almost inexplicable anomaly in the law which basically says that one arm of the government--the IRS--can actually know the whereabouts of a missing child but can't share that information with another arm of government--namely, State and local law enforcement--which, in most cases, almost 100 percent of cases involving missing children, is the level of government that actually deals with the investigation and attempts to recover children.
So you have a situation where you have got all these resources and efforts happening at the State and local level scurrying around, trying to find leads for abducted children, yet the government is sitting on information in terms of tax returns that were filed with the Social Security number of the child who is missing or the suspected abductor, and the two levels of government can't talk to each other.
This legislation will break down that barrier and allow, again, timely information to be shared for the thousands of children, which we know from data that the missing children foundation and other law enforcement groups have been sharing with Congress over a number of years.
So again, as was said earlier, the data is astonishing: 200,000 abductions are reported each year; 12,000 tend to last longer than 6 months. In 2007, the Treasury Department looked at 1,700 Social Security numbers of missing kids and found that, as Mr. Pascrell said, over a third had been used in returns after the abduction.
For some it is really kind of hard to imagine how an abducting relative or even stranger could have the nerve to file a tax return and claim the Social Security and child exemption for the child that they have in their possession, but the data shows that, in fact, that happens. It may be because they are anxious to get the refund; it may be because they don't want to be violating a second set of laws in terms of not filing a tax return. But the fact of the matter is that there are thousands of children that the government knows their whereabouts, and this law will allow that information to be shared. For every family that will benefit from it, it really is just an amazing opportunity for us to really relieve the stress and pain that these horrible cases inflict year in and year out.
As I said, it took 5 years. We have a great coalition of outside groups that are supporting it. As Calvin Coolidge once said: ``Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence . . . The slogan `Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.'' This, I think, is an example of it. It took 5 long years, but the House is now poised to move forward on H.R. 3209, Recovering Missing Children Act, and again we want to get swift passage and move this through the Senate and to the President's desk so that we can, again, provide a lot of relief and solace to families that are anxiously looking for their loved ones.
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