IRS Oversight While Eliminating Spending (OWES) Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, one of the easiest things you can do to get people to cheer for you is to bash someone or something that everyone loves to hate, as you have heard it said before. I don't know if there is a better example of this than the IRS. Everyone loves to hate the IRS.

At the end of the day, though, if you want to have our troops paid, if you want to have our security handled at our airports, if you want to make sure that our national parks are protected, you need to have the revenues; and so we need the IRS so that all of us who voluntarily are supposed to pay our taxes do so and pay our fair share.

Again, we could all point to the story of the case where the IRS flubbed it, didn't do a good job, and so it is easy to pile on. If we could create a pinata that looked like the IRS, I guarantee you it would be the hottest selling pinata in the history of pinata making. So let's just put that on the table. Let's grant that to everyone. It is easy to bash the IRS.

Let's go to this bill, though. What will this bill do?

First, it does some really strange things, and then it does some really harmful things. But worse than that, it is never going to become law. So we are spending time talking about something that is never going to become law.

But on what the bill does, let me give you a clear example of why it is so unfortunate that we do this IRS bashing. One of these provisions tells the IRS that it cannot retain the dollars it collects as user fees for having provided services to individuals or corporations that seek out special services from the IRS.

You have got a big corporation; you just broke it up into pieces; you want to make sure you are filing your taxes correctly. You need a special advisory opinion from the IRS, which isn't something they typically do for most Americans, so they say: Well, that is extra stuff; we are going to have to charge you a user fee for having done that for you.

Principally, these user fees come from wealthier companies or wealthier individuals who have more complicated tax filings that they have to submit. We charge them that because not every American has to request that kind of service from the IRS. IRS collects that fee.

This bill says: IRS, you don't get to keep the money, even though you had to provide the service and pull your resources and your personnel from doing the regular taxpayers' filings and examining those to do this special work. You cannot keep that even though you expended resources to do that work.

The best way I could compare it is to a situation I encountered recently. I participated in a funeral service, and it was a very dignified service. At the end of the service in the place of worship in the church, we all caravanned together with the hearse and the family of the deceased individual to the cemetery. It was a long line of vehicles. It was a great service. A lot of people showed up.

We were fortunate to have the assistance of police officers who directed traffic because we went through a whole bunch of intersections. We had to make sure that, to the degree possible, we didn't disrupt traffic a whole lot and we didn't have a whole bunch of accidents on the way to the cemetery. It all worked out perfectly. At the end, once we reached the cemetery, the officers left.

Now, the officers did that job not because that is the usual course of business for police officers in our cities and our counties. They did that because the police department offers that service so that we don't disrupt the greater activity around our city when there is a funeral. That way you offer the dignity to that family as well in the services for that deceased individual. You pay for that service to the police department because you pulled police officers off their regular beat to do that work. That is a user fee.

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Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, this bill's proposal on user fees is tantamount to telling the police department: You must provide that service for people to be able to have their funeral service, but you will not get compensated for your police officers being pulled from their regular duty of protecting our streets to help with that funeral service.

It is inane. It is crazy to do that. So rather than do bills that are going to go nowhere, let's get our job done. We get elected to do some very important things. On the tax side, we certainly could do what Mr. Doggett mentioned earlier. Let's go after those Benedict Arnolds who decide they are going to leave the country not because they want to go live somewhere else, it is that they don't want to pay taxes in America. So they are going to leave their place of legal residency as America. They are still going to have their home here, but they are just going to call home somewhere else for legal purposes so they don't pay taxes. Billions of dollars we are losing, we know, as a result of corporations and all our wealthy individuals incorporating in places like the Cayman Islands.

Secondly, all the money that is being spent in campaigns today is being done by what are called not-for-profit organizations that we used to think used to do social welfare.

Now guess what they are doing?

They are spending their money on campaigns. We need to stop that as well. That is what we should be doing--doing our job, not taking money out of an agency that is trying to make sure that we do this the right way for everyone who pays their fair share of taxes.

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