Washington, DC – January 10, 2007 –Today, Congressman José E. Serrano, the newly-named chair of the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, expressed his opposition to the IRS’s outsourcing of debt collection.

“I agree with the Taxpayer Advocate Service’s report which said that outsourcing the debt collections of the IRS is both wasteful and inefficient,” Serrano said. “This program privatizes a function of the IRS without any added cost-effectiveness. Paying up to 25 cents on the dollar collected by the private debt collection agencies takes much-needed revenue away from the federal government, which could do the work more efficiently. I do not believe in outsourcing simply for outsourcing’s sake especially when it is more costly to taxpayers.”

The IRS began this program in September 2006, with Congressional authorization. The IRS has a collections budget of nearly $2 billion with thousands of employees—allowing them to complete this work far more efficiently than by outsourcing it. According to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, the IRS currently has at least 65 employees monitoring the work of the outside collections agencies, who in turn have approximately 75 employees working on the cases.