ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 14, 1997 TAG: 9704140127
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
Pity the overworked tax collectors? Not when some find time to engage in unauthorized snooping.
TO THINK - we were almost feeling sorry for the Internal Revenue Service.
Time magazine's April 7 edition described an agency unable to do its job because of a klutzy computer system, a dysfunctional operation that overburdens its 106,000 employees, and one that is easily pillaged by tax cheats who have discovered that the IRS - ``a great, clanking Rube Goldberg contraption ... disastrously and inexplicably inept''- can't catch them.
Morale at the agency is low, says Time, and doubtless not helped by the criticism it gets for costing the federal government $150 billion a year in uncollected taxes.
We put away our crying towel upon learning that overburdened IRS employees still seem to find the time and means to electronically snoop into taxpayers' confidential files.
The IRS, according to a General Accounting Office report, has made little progress in deterring privacy invasions by in-house spies, despite its proclaimed policy of ``zero tolerance'' for unauthorized browsing. ``If anything, it's getting worse,'' said an aide to Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, who brought the snooping scandal to light in 1993.
Said Time: The agency known for turning thumbscrews on tax miscreants is actually so creaky and inefficient that the odds that Americans will be prosecuted for tax crimes are about the same as being murdered on the street, 17 in a million.
Small wonder, if the IRS can't even crack down on its own employees who are electronically and illegally window-peeping on law-abiding citizens.
LENGTH: Short : 37 linesby CNB