One of the key weaknesses of the Roman Empire was its reliance on tax farming (the actual term, by the way)–the practice of selling offices to private interests in return for a given sum of money to be obtained from the residents of the provinces governed. The tax farmers bought their offices and then were given a free hand to be as brutal as desired in raising the revenue.

Citizens for Tax Justice, one of the best and most respected nonprofits in America, has a campaign to oppose the Bush Administration’s new reliance on private tax collectors — business buddies of the right who get to keep 25-30% of the take on the overdue collections. The unpaid taxes each year in America are estimated at $300 BILLION dollars; rather than hire more IRS employees to audit companies like Wal-Mart (notorious for its expertise in tax evasion) and the wealthiest individual filers, the Bushies have slashed IRS employment, particularly in the enforcement sections, and then, to make it worse, have privatized collections. Bringing back tax farming, in other words. It’s truly eerie how these guys reach back into history for the very worst idea: torture, absolute government, secret imprisonment, and now tax farming.

The new Democratic majority has apparently put the brakes on this (see below) but it’s worth following closely. Of all the states, Oregon is perhaps the one most suffering from the Bush Administration and the GOP controlled Congress’s conscious decision not to enforce the tax laws by reducing enforcement and auditing, particularly against the wealthy and corporations engaging in offshore tax sheltering and other abuses. Libraries across southern Oregon are closed; students are coming to expect that post-high school education means crushing debt, etc. etc. — all because BushCo. winks at tax evasion by the rich (even while stepping up audits of poor people seeking the Earned Income Tax Credit).

And check out the website for Citizens for Tax Justice (www.ctj.org), including this link that explains what’s going on in Congress, from which the excerpt below is taken.

Tax Collection:
House Appropriators to Pull the Plug on Outsourcing Tax Collection - 6/22/07

The House Appropriations Committee approved the “Financial Services” spending bill last week, which includes funding for the IRS and other agencies within the Treasury, as well as for the District of Columbia and several other agencies. Notably, the bill includes language that limits funding of tax debt collection by private collection agencies to $1 million, effectively killing the IRS’s practice of outsourcing tax collection.

The IRS’s private debt collection program pays private contractors a commission of 21 to 24 cents for every dollar of tax debt that they recover, while it’s estimated that IRS employees can do the job for about 3 cents for every dollar collected. The private contractors are paid on a commission unlike IRS employees, so there is a concern among many that they have an incentive to be overly aggressive and less respectful of taxpayers’ privacy rights, a concern echoed by Nina Olson, the National Taxpayer Advocate.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Economy, Equal/Civil Rights, Tax Reform/Tax Fairness, Walmart & Big Boxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.