THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 27, 1996 TAG: 9607270016
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 43 lines
Well, this is smart. GOP majorities in House and Senate have passed bills that will squeeze the IRS budget and hamper its ability to collect taxes.
In the famous formulation of John Marshall, ``the power to tax involves the power to destroy.'' For that reason, Congress and the executive need to keep tight control over how much power the Internal Revenue Service is permitted to exercise.
Oversight is needed. Tax policy ought to be set by elected officials answerable to the public, not by proverbial faceless bureaucrats. Too often, the IRS has overstepped its bounds, nocent, penalized honest mistakes and treated citizens as guilty until proved innocent.
Congress is guilty of creating a Byzantine tax code that rewards the well-connected with loopholes while subjecting the average taxpayer to enigmas wrapped in mysteries that require a vast and costly infrastructure of accountants, attorneys, preparers and enforcers.
That said, however, the answer is not the one adopted by the House and Senate. They propose cutting funding in the middle of the procurement process for a new computer system intended to streamline and speed the processing of returns.
It's true that the system has been plagued with problems, but starving it of funding midway through the installation won't cure anything and will prolong the agony. The House idea, to turn over much of the project to the Department of Defense, home of the cost overrun, is laughably wrongheaded. Do we really want the Pentagon processing our tax returns?
The House and Senate also propose a budget cut of between 5 percent and 10 percent that would reduce the ability of the IRS to audit returns and collects taxes.
That may sound ideal to those annoyed at their tax bill, but any aid and comfort it provides won't be to honest wage-earning taxpayers but to scofflaws. They will be emboldened to take a free ride at the expense of all of the rest of the country's taxpayers.
Reform of the tax code is overdue. Making the IRS more efficient is imperative. But making it harder for the IRS to collect taxes and catch cheats benefits no one except the deadbeats. Far from fixing the IRS, the proposed budget cuts will only foul it up further. by CNB