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.

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.

The contractor at Walter Reed who's taken much blame for the wretched conditions there is tangled up in IRS privatization, too. Unbossed has the story.

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.

GovExec has a good story today on how privatization may have made the situation at Walter Reed even worse. A prolonged public-private competition demoralized staff, nearly 100 of whom quit.

On Monday, Weightman said attrition reduced the number of employees affected by the competition from a high of 190 down to about 100 people. He said that despite being given authority to staff up to bridge the gap, he was unable to find more than 10 additional people to take positions not slated to last beyond four months.

If all this is true, last year's Congress had a hand in it. In September, the Senate voted to table, or kill, an amendment to the FY 07 Defense Appropriations bill that would have prevented the Army from privatizing those services. In effect, those voting "yea" were voting for privatization- for making the problem worse for injured veterans.

Take a look at the roll call vote. The vote was very close- 48-50. If one "yea" vote had switched to "nea," the amendment probably would not have been killed.

The House, in fact, approved the same amendment. But because of the Senate vote, it was not included in the enacted appropriations bill.