auditcongress.com

Recent coverage and reports in the Main Stream Media have shown that tax deadbeats in the Federal Government, including in Congress, are a real issue. While I expect that the MSM will soon drop the story, Audit Congress will continue to educate the public about this issue.

Professor Paul Caron, editor of the TaxProf Blog , details some of the findings contained in a report on Federal employee tax deadbeats issued by the IRS. He also documents the media coverage by The Atlantic, Fox News, The Hill, The L.A. Times, and the Washington Post.

Professor Caron’s post includes a link to the IRS data, and he provides a summary of delinquency rates by departments and agencies. Several things jump out at one when reviewing the summary.  First, the Treasury department has the lowest employee delinquency rate of any cabinet department, just shy of 1%. It is ironic that the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, inflates their score. Way to set an example there, Mr. Secretary!

More irony: The US Tax Court, the SEC, and the Federal Reserve Board all show up on this list with delinquency rates of 1.75%, 2.44% and 4.32% respectively. The Small Business Administration comes in at a whopping 6.34%. (The SBA employees are by no means the worst offenders; that honor goes to the “Committee for Purchase from People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled”, at 14.29%) One would be forgiving for thinking that the employees of Federal departments and agencies having great financial responsibilities would be financialy responsible and properly calculate and pay their taxes.

At a Federal level, tax delinquency seems to be a universal issue. Over 280,000 Federal workers and retirees from almost every department and agency owe more than $3.3 billion in back taxes. The overall delinquency rate seems to be around a 3% for these workers and retirees. According to the web site Taxcut 2010, the IRS does not supply a compliance rate for individual taxpayer delinquencies in the US for comparison. In any case, some will argue that all Federal workers should be held to a higher standard than the general public. While we won’t make that argument here, we will argue that a subset of these workers-those who make our laws, high administration officials and those who run the Federal departments and agencies-should indeed be held to a higher standard.

Staff members of the Senate and House of Representatives of the US Congress, including members of Congress themselves, are on the list. Of course, this list was compiled from just the known tax deadbeats.  The last several years’ reporting has shown that there seems to be many non-compliance issues in Congress that are only revealed under extraordinary circumstances.  How long has Charlie Rangel gotten away with ignoring the very laws he helped to craft?

I don’t think I’m the only American who suspects that the number of tax offenders in Congress is much higher than is shown by this report. After all, what IRS auditor would dare to audit a Congressman or a White House official? Congress and the Administration write their budget, and hire and fire their bosses.

The report says that 41 White House staff members owe over $800,000.  Is that a few or a lot?  Hard to say.  This TalkingPointsMemo article includes a report issued by the White House itself showing 487 staffers currently working in the White House. However comments on the article note that many career staffers and other employees were not included in the list for one reason or another.  I saw one reference elsewhere that the true number was well over 1000 employees and staff members. Personally, I don’t think it really matters if the rate shown by the IRS report is 10% or 2%. I think the true number of tax offenders in the White House is probably much higher than in this report for the same reasons I think the numbers in Congress are much higher: What Federal employee who valued their job and reputation would dare take on and investigate a member of this administration?

Timothy Geithner runs the Treasury Department, and he has admitted to having tax issues, but only after the heavy scrutiny of a Cabinet Post approval process. He blamed his problems on the tax software he was using, a claim that ordinary Americans cannot use.

All of this is just more data to support our call for “High Government Officials” to be included in the list of those who should be required to be audited by the IRS each year. What we propose is automatic, annual audits of all Congressmen, their staff members, and all high Government Officials.

Let’s audit Congress.  Every Year!

Dan Murphy