House Debates Taxpayer Assistance and Simplification Act
This week the House is passing a series of measures to protect and assist the American taxpayer, following up on several other bills passed during this Congress.
Paying Taxes Takes More Time, Money
Jim Abrams, Associated Press - April 14, 2008
Congress is marking Tax Day with several initiatives to make paying taxes simpler or fairer. On Monday the House is considering a bill to bar federal agencies from awarding contracts to people or companies that have failed to pay their federal taxes.Later in the week, the chamber will vote on a bill that, among other provisions, eliminates a requirement for individuals to keep records of calls made on employer-provided cell phones and stops foreign contractors from using foreign subsidiaries to evade Social Security and other employment taxes. That legislation would also terminate a program under which the IRS contracts with private debt collection companies to pursue smaller scale tax evaders.
Read more on the Contracting and Tax Accountability Act, which did pass yesterday after that story, and the Taxpayer Assistance and Simplification Act, which is being debated now.
Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel speaks in favor:
| Caucus Chairman Emanuel: "KBR didn't pay unemployment insurance, they didn't pay Medicare. And the way this was discovered was a worker who was laid off went to go collect unemployment insurance and was told, 'No, you don't have the money for that because you didn't pay in.' And he said, 'No, I work for an American company,' and then discovered that in fact he didn't work for an American company. KBR was a company set up in the Cayman Islands for the purpose of avoiding paying their fair share of taxes. And it's right here on April 15 when Americans are facing bigger tax bills, higher costs for health care, higher costs for education, higher costs for gasoline, that in fact those companies that are in Iraq pay their fair share and not use the tax code to avoid their responsibility." |
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (OR-03) speaks in favor:
| Rep. Blumenauer: "I find no small amount of irony listening to our friends on the other side of the aisle talk about complexity on tax day, because for the 12 years that they were in charge, there was an explosion, hundreds of thousands of additional words added to the IRS code--loopholes and complexity, not simplification. It's absolute hogwash that there are areas that the IRS won't go after to collect and we have to use private collection agencies. Republicans are the people who decided to underfund the IRS. Testimony before our committee was conclusive. The IRS-trained employees collect eight times as much per person as these bounty hunters that they contract out to." |
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (CT-03) speaks in favor:
| Rep. DeLauro: "What does it say about our nation and our priorities when American companies like Kellogg, Brown, and Root, by far the largest contractor in Iraq, are allowed to take their Department of Defense dollars and filter them through offshore shell companies in order to avoid paying significant Social Security and Medicare taxes?" |
Rep. Brad Ellsworth (IN-08) speaks in favor:
| Rep. Ellsworth: "No one likes paying taxes, but what folks really hate is when they have to pay more because bad actors are gaming the system and not paying their fair share. In fact, recent reports in the Boston Globe showed that some government contractors have been using off-shore Cayman Island tax-havens to avoid paying their payroll taxes that they owe... My constituents back in the eighth district of Indiana don't want to pay even more taxes to shore up programs like Social Security and Medicare because companies who received billions of dollars from this very government are exploiting the tax system today." |