OMB Watch has joined with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Citizens for Tax Justice, and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) to urge that Congress pass H.R. 695 and S. 335, bills that would end the IRS private tax collection program.

Take a look at the letters we sent to the House and the Senate, where we make the case that this wasteful and dangerous program should be terminated immediately.

And let your representative know what you think about tax bounty hunters - take part in Citizens for Tax Justice's email campaign!

According to BNA ($), Former Minerals Management Service auditor Bobby L. Maxwell testified in Congress yesterday that the Interior Department tried to prevent him from collecting unpaid royalties from oil company Kerr-McGee Corp. He was told that pursuing the case would make MMS director Johnnie Burton "unhappy," and was subsequently fire from his job after filing a lawsuit under the False Claims Act.

MMS sent a clear signal to would-be royalty collectors when it fired Maxwell. Of course this is just another instance of the Interior cutting holes in Treasury's pockets, but one wonders just how much money the treasury is losing because the Interior Department is actively quashing these sorts of investigations.

GSA Administrator Lurita Doan got a grilling from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today. Check out this clip from the hearing where Doan fails to give any explanation for what appears to be the political usage of federal assets- taxpayer money being used to get Republicans elected.

If this is the best she can do, Doan's days as GSA administrator should be numbered.

Good news on the IRS privatization front- Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel (D-NY) has stated his intention to repeal the IRS privatization program and in the meantime has asked that IRS not issue any more contracts to private debt collectors.

Rep. Rangel's interest is most likely in moving forward with H.R. 695, a bill co-sponsored by Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Steve Rothman (D-NJ) with bipartisan support that would end the privatization program once and for all. Again, this is great news, and we hope that Rep. Rangel moves forward on this issue soon.

Rep. Rangel said his immediate concerns over the program stem from a suspicious refusal by the IRS not to renew one of the debt collector's contracts. The contractor -Linebarger Goggan Blair & Sampson- is a debt collector based in Texas that has had its employees convicted of bribing public officials and is being sued for doing the same now, as the New York Times reported last August.

But problems with these contractors don't end there. One of other three companies awarded contracts -Pioneer Credit Recovery, Inc.- just so happens to be based in the district of Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), as confirmed by FedSpending.Org data. Rep. Reynolds is the author of the bill language that established the program in the 2004 Job Creation Act.

Pioneer's CEO also happens to be a major donor to the Republican Party and Rep. Reynolds' campaigns. See this Unbossed post for details.

Now, this program is not an earmark- Congress did not pass a bill that directed these contracts to particular companies. IRS ran a competition over which company got the contracts. So one would assume that Pioneer and Linebarger won the contracts fair and square.

But the competition was fishy, too. IRS set the compensation rates at 21 to 24 percent of the backtaxes the companies brought in- an incredibly high number, given that IRS employees could do the same work for 3 cents for every collected tax dollar. IRS to my knowledge has not explained why it did not put these terms up for competition.

Some of the companies that competed for the contract filed complaints with GAO that the competition wasn't fair. GAO also issued a report that found that IRS proceeded with the program hastily, failing to first set up a way to correct errors in program management or evaluate its cost-effectiveness. You'd think IRS would pay special attention to managing this program, because a similar program in 1996 was found to have cost more money than it brought in and involved contractors who harrassed and abused taxpayers.

Despite all these realized and potential problems with the program, IRS keeps charging ahead, with the blessing of the Bush administration and many senior congressional Republicans. It's a welcome sign that Rep. Rangel intends to stop this program by pushing through the bipartisan-supported H.R. 695.

General Services Administrator Lurita Doan is on the front page of the Washington Post once again. This article plays up the allegation that GSA held events to help Republican candidates in the 2006 election. Not much new is revealed in the article, though if you're not familiar with the whole ordeal it's a good place to start.

The other element of this story is GSA's assault on the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). After the OIG objected to a GSA contract with Sun Microsystems, and launched an investigation into a suspicious no-bid contract that Doan tried to award to a personal friend, Doan tried to reduce the OIG's funding and restrict what it could audit. See this timeline for lots of links to articles on the scandal re: the OIG.

Can you guess which disaster this Washington Post article is about?

In a stinging, wide-ranging assessment of..efforts, .... said that...had no strategy for restoring either government institutions or infrastructure. And in the years since, other agencies joined the effort without an overall plan and without a structure in place to organize and execute a task of such magnitude.

Lines of authority remained unclear in the...effort. With a demand for speed and a shortage of government personnel, much of the oversight was turned over to the contractors doing the work. There was little coordination among the various agencies. The result was a series of missed opportunities to address the unraveling situation....

A. Hurricane Katrina.
B. The Iraq war reconstruction
C. The Afghanistan war
D. It's an article from the future- it's about how they'll handle the next disaster.

Some 21,000 health professional who participate in Medicare owe more than $1.3 billion in backtaxes, the NYT reports today.

All the money would have been recovered if Medicare officials had decided to participate in a program that withholds government payments to contractors who owe backtaxes. The Defense Department and many civilian agencies take part in the program.

So instead of simply withholding some money from wealthy doctors who benefit from government programs- one of whom reportedly owes $3 million in backtaxes- this administration is hiring well-connected private debt collectors who get to make enormous profits at taxpayer expense to go after low-income elderly people who owe small tax debts.

This administration's priorities for tax enforcement are just as perverse and preferential to the wealthy as anything else it does- kudos to the New York Times for taking notice.

Robert Novak reports today that the OMB database on earmarks is intentionally incomplete- orders came from the White House to not finish it, for fear of offending earmark beneficiaries.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the "Accountability in Contracting Act" by a vote of 347 - 73. The bill (H.R. 1362) would improve oversight of federal contractors by restricting the use of sole-source, or no-bid, contracts and require large contracting agencies to minimize their use of cost-reimbursement contracts. It would also tighten post-employment restrictions on government procurement officials and permanently extend the acquisition workforce training fund.

Despite unsubstantiated objections by the White House, the House moved quickly this week, marking up the contracting bill in both the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the House Armed Services Committee, and passing the bill on the floor in the span of only nine days.

The bill was the fifth passed by the House during Sunshine Week, all of which would expand and strengthen the transparency and accountability of the federal government. The other bills concerned protecting government whistleblowers, expanding the Freedom of Information Act, restoring the automatic release of presidential records, and requiring disclosure of donors to presidential libraries.

TAKE ACTION: Contact your Senators and Representative today to increase contractor responsibility and oversight!

Ace investigative tax reporter David Cay Johnston has tracked down another ridiculous IRS proposal: outsource the writing of IRS regulations to the people they regulate.

Check out the story in today's New York Times. Money quote (from our executive director):

Looking at the issue in its broadest terms, Gary D. Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that tracks the Office of Management and Budget, warned that the Bush administration was turning over too much government responsibility to those it is supposed to be keeping an eye on.

"Why don't we just privatize Congress and outsource the development of our laws?" he asked.

"People would chuckle at letting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or OMB Watch write the laws," he went on, "but that is what is being done by this administration, which keeps outsourcing more and more regulation work."

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House committee on government reform and oversight, has introduced a bill that would go a long way toward reforming the contracting process.

The bill would make publicly available more information on contracts, fix parts of the contracting process that have been exploited by wasteful contractors, and move towards closing the revolving door between government employees and contractors.

We look forward to see where Waxman takes this bill. Meanwhile, check out FedSpending.org for the most comprehensive data set out there on government contracting.

As the saga of the General Services Administration (Or GSA, a government agency that handles contracts for other agencies) Adminstrator Lurita Doan unfolds, let's take a look back at everything that got us where we are. There seem to be four things at issue: a contract with Sun Microsystems, a contract with a friend of Doan's, the GSA's inspector general's budget, and talk of GSA employees engaging in electoral campaigning.

So far, it amounts to abuses of power, a war on accountability, and potential violations of federal law.

GSA Administrator Lurita Doan is in hot water again. Rep. Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, has just obtained documents that demonstrate that Doan had a long-standing relationship with a prospecitve recipient of a no-bid contract (the contract was never issued). A Jan. 19 Washington Post story first broke the news that Doan tried to intervene in the contracting-out process on behalf of this friend of hers.

Waxman has also received information showing that Doan asked GSA staff to help Republican candidates in the 2006 election, and that Doan inappropriately intervened in a contracting dispute with Sun Microsystems.

Doan has been invited (but not subpeonaed) to testify before the committee on March 20th.

At a hearing of the House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee yesterday, Chairman Jose Serrano (D-NY) made some harsh statements about the IRS privitization program that has outsourced some tax collection duties. Serrano said that the program is on its "deathbed" and that the program does not have a lot of supporters in Congress right now.

This is certainly welcome news from the appropriations subcommittee chair who has jurisdiction over the IRS. Yet another key voice has chimmed in on this program and the verdict is not good.