Clinton to Propose New Legislation on Taxpayer Rights

Two weeks after dramatic Senate hearings on IRS misconduct, President Clinton today plans to propose changes, including new taxpayer rights legislation and greater citizen involvement in fielding complaints, a congressman and staff members said.

Clinton plans to recommend citizen advocacy boards at the Internal Revenue Service and an enhanced role for the agency’s taxpayer advocate’s office, according to Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).

Portman, who was briefed on the announcement by a top Clinton official, said Vice President Al Gore will unveil results of a National Performance Review study of customer service practices. The review will recommend internal administrative reforms at the IRS.

And the president will discuss the administration’s work on improving the IRS, work that predates last month’s Senate Finance Committee hearings, Portman said.

Portman, who co-chaired a yearlong study panel of the IRS, is sponsor of a bill that would create a nine-member board with private citizens to oversee IRS operations. The Clinton administration strongly opposes Portman’s bill.

Portman said Clinton’s initiatives are “too little, too late.”

“My fear is if we just do these smaller measures that, two years from now, we will just be right back up on Capitol Hill talking about more taxpayer abuses ... and we will need to do new legislative proposals,” Portman said.

Rep. Bill Archer (R-Texas), the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, said although he is pleased to see Clinton responding, “The last thing the IRS needs is another advisory board that has no real power, while control of the IRS is left in the hands of political appointees at the Department of Treasury.”

Further details about the proposals weren’t available. A White House spokesman declined immediate comment. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin met with House Democrats earlier in the day to discuss in general the administration’s IRS initiatives.

“We have been focusing very intensively on IRS reform well before the media began focusing on it two years ago,” Rubin said. He declined to describe any details of Clinton’s announcement.

One GOP staff member, speaking on backgroundcondition of anonymity, said the citizen advocacy boards that will be announced are different from the citizen review panels that the administration broached last week.

The advocacy boards would seek to improve taxpayer education while more efficiently channeling complaints to the IRS taxpayer advocate’s office, Portman and staff members said.

Portman said a couple of the taxpayer rights proposals in his bill will be included in the Clinton plan. Last year, Clinton signed a separate taxpayer bill of rights aimed at helping taxpayers wronged by the IRS; an earlier one was enacted in 1988.

The administration has defended its oversight of the IRS amid the Senate hearings, at which agents described abuse of taxpayer information and a quota-driven work force.

The Treasury Department canceled several major IRS computer modernization projects and called for a major change in the agency’s technology program after a failed $3.3-billion IRS computer upgrade.

The IRS Telefile program, which enables taxpayers with simple returns to file taxes by telephone, is an agency highlight. On Wednesday, the Ford Foundation awarded the IRS a $100,000 “Innovations in Government” award for the success of the Telefile program.