No Hires for the Delinquent IRS Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. POCAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, this week represents another missed opportunity for Congress to take action on the challenges facing the American people.

I understand that we are at this point because the majority can't pass a budget, they can't take action to combat the Zika virus, they can't help the people of Flint, Michigan, and they can't address the opiate crisis.

Unfortunately, your right wing and your extreme right wing can't seem to agree with each other. Instead of taking real action, we are going to vote today to prohibit the IRS from hiring any new employees until the Treasury certifies that none of the agency's existing employees have unpaid taxes.

This legislation is both unworkable and unnecessary. IRS employees have a tax compliance rate of over 99 percent, but a hiring freeze will hinder our ability to go after the real tax cheats in this country, and that is something we should all be able to agree on.

Instead of arbitrary changes to the IRS, Congress needs to take action to make our Tax Code work for the American people instead of corporate interests, something that is conspicuously absent from your debate today.

Let's talk about how we can close loopholes that allow multinational corporations to pay nothing in Federal income taxes while working class Americans and small businesses pay their fair share.

Let's have a debate about the corporate tax dodgers who are able to shift their headquarters out of the country with a stroke of the pen, all while continuing to use our American infrastructure resources and customer base.

Let's talk about the thousands and thousands of tax-dodging corporations, including the 18,000 corporations that are registered to a single building in the Cayman Islands, a building full of post office boxes.

Today corporate profits are at an all-time high, but the share of Federal revenue from corporate taxes continues to shrink, dropping from 33 percent of the revenue in 1952 to less than 10 percent today.

While many corporations complain about the 35 percent statutory tax rate, the reality is the effective tax rate is much lower. In fact, a 2013 GAO report found that U.S. corporations pay an effective tax rate of just 12.6 percent. A recent study from Oxfam found that U.S. corporations are currently hiding $1.4 trillion in profits from domestic taxation in tax havens like in Panama and the Cayman Islands.

While corporations dodge paying their fair share in taxes, the burden falls to the middle class and the small businesses in all of our districts, and that is just wrong. That is the reality of why we are here with these useless bills in consideration this week. Once again, the majority can't pass a budget well past the required deadline. Let's have a serious conversation about how we can adjust our Tax Code away from the corporate interests and in favor of working families.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source