Treasury Chief Cites IRS Need for Budget Hike
Assuring that every cent of taxes owed to the government is collected might take an additional 50,000 to 60,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service, Secretary of the Treasury James A. Baker III said Friday.
“Scares you to death, doesn’t it?” Baker told Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) during an appearance before a Senate appropriations subcommittee.
“On the one hand, it scares you to death. On the other hand, you could solve the federal deficit problem and the jobs problem at the same time,” Domenici joked.
Baker was testifying in defense of the Reagan Administration’s request for a $400-million increase in the IRS fiscal 1988 budget, contending it would yield “$9 in increased revenue for every dollar spent.”
Domenici asked how many more employees it would take at the agency to reach a “saturation point,” where additional spending would not produce additional revenues through tighter tax law enforcement.
“We’re a long way from there,” Baker said. “They could employ 50,000 to 60,000 people over the next 10 years before saturation.”
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