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Floor Speech
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Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, last year, I introduced a handful of bills that would help the IRS do its job better. One of those bills is called the IRS Customer Service Improvement Act. This bill simply says that IRS staffers cannot perform any union tasks during the tax season, which seems to make sense. It doesn't keep them from doing it through the rest of the year. It is just not during the busy tax season.
According to the Treasury, in fiscal year 2019, 1,400 Treasury employees used over 350,000 hours of taxpayer-funded union time. It cost $17 million. Of course, that is kind of like chump change in this day and age. Back in Indiana, $17 million is a lot of money. It should be everywhere. Of these employees, 350 of the jobs were IRS customer service representatives and 204 were IRS agents. The American public deserves out of our Agencies, I think, service better than that.
We can debate how much money the IRS needs to do its job, but we need commonsense policies like this to where we are not trying to restrict what already, to many, would seem unusual--that when you are on the dime, when you are being paid by the Federal Government, you maybe shouldn't be able to do union activities at the same time. Anyway, a lot of things don't make sense here. This will immediately add value to the American taxpayer.
The IRS is warning Americans to prepare for delays and long hold times when filing their taxes this year. I would say that most folks would say that you need improvement.
Here are a couple of other particulars: They received more than 100 million calls but only answer 1 out of 4. Calls averaged 18 minutes of hold time. In my own business, if you add 18 minutes of hold time, you just gave the order to one of your four or five competitors. None of us likes that.
Face-to-face assistance declined from 4.4 million in fiscal 2016 to only 1 million in 2020. The IRS is now telling us to buckle up for service even to get worse.
Let's use some common sense. Before you raise prices in a business or you ask your customers to even be more forbearing when you are delivering bad service, your competitors would take you out. Here, in the Federal Government, you don't have that kind of inherent competition, and, sadly, the public--American taxpayers--have to put up with it. And when your default position is always to spend more money, I know the American public is interested in something better than this. Sadly, for whatever we do that is above and beyond the ordinary, we were borrowing 23 cents of every dollar we spend here. Now it is up closer to 30 cents, and it is in the context that we are $30 trillion in debt to boot.
This is something, what I am proposing here, since it doesn't eliminate your ability to do it, let's just take it out of the tax season.
Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 2132, and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Mr. BRAUN. Madam President.
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Mr. BRAUN. Briefly, respecting what the Senator says about wealthy tax cheats, I agree with him 100 percent. Everybody should pay their fair share. But I guarantee you, there wasn't one wealthy tax cheat that was on hold for 18 minutes. They are not calling in. They hired a lawyer or somebody to do it.
This is impacting Americans, mom-and-pop business owners, folks who just need to talk to someone. It is not a wealthy tax cheat who would have made 1 of 100 million calls. They don't do that. There is another way to go after that.
All I am saying is, during the busiest time of the year, let's take the resources that we have got, whether they need to be enhanced or not, and let's let them focus on the job of answering the phone and not making a small taxpayer suffer. They are the ones wrestling with the IRS by numbers, not wealthy tax cheats.
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