Public Business, Private Profit. The Bush Administration is stealing from the Government to move public moneys into private pockets, by farming out collections from the Internal Revenue Service to three private companies. The report I saw on CNN yesterday said that analysts believe the IRS could do the job cheaper, and the Government would keep everything collected, whereas these private companies will keep as much as 24% of the take! USA Today confirms that:

IRS officials say the plan involves smaller cases that federal agents wouldn't otherwise have time to pursue. The profit potential is large. The collection companies will keep up to 24% of what they recover. That amounts to as much as $336 million of the $1.4 billion the IRS projects the program will recover during the next decade.

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Think about that. The Bush Administration is privatizing something the Government could do better for less!
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Moreover, people's tax information is being shipped to private companies, with all the risks of disclosure and identity theft that such release entails.
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These private companies will not be restrained from abusive practices the way the IRS has been of late, when enormous numbers of complaints caused Congress to rein in abuse.
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Even worse, observers think there is huge potential for fraud, as con artists pose as Government-authorized collection agencies for tax delinquencies!
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There is just so much wrong with this that it's hard to understand how it could happen. Are all the Nation's consumer protection agency and groups like the National Taxpayers Union asleep at the switch? I just checked the NTU's website and saw no mention of this story.
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Privatization is supposed to save taxpayers money, not cost us more money. Nor is it supposed to allow abuses we finally got stopped to resume under different entities. Where is the indignation — no, rage?
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I heard about this privatization a couple of weeks ago when I had to send the IRS some money and found that if I paid by credit or debit card, I would have to deal with a private company and pay a fee! Pay a fee to a private company to pay the IRS?!? That's insane.
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This story was very prominent on CNN yesterday, but I couldn't find it on CNN.com nor NYTimes.com today. Why is that? Media should be watchdogs on Government wrongdoing, and this is an astoundingly brazen act of theft from the public coffers and abuse of the public by the Bush Administration. If the media won't protect us, the Democrats should make a huge issue of it for the November election. The Republicans are stealing from the IRS to give to private business! If the Democrats can't make hay with this, they should just hang up their hat and go the way of the Whigs.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,657 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:55 PM