Lawmaker Vows to Seek Right to Sue IRS

Taxpayers need more protection in their dealings with the Internal Revenue Service, including the right to sue the government’s tax-collecting agency, the chief of the House tax-writing committee said Saturday.

“We will make it easier for taxpayers who are wrongly accused by the IRS to recover their legal costs,” said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer (R-Texas). Recovery of costs in such cases will be part of a set of reform proposals coming before his panel later this month, he added.

“And we will require the IRS to inform citizens of their precise reason that they’re being audited,” Archer said in the Republican response that followed President Clinton’s weekly radio talk, which dealt with an anti-drug advertising campaign.

Archer said there were too many cases of people “coerced” into making tax payments out of fear of the IRS and that all too often “the defenseless and the weak become targets for the IRS audits.”

The comments came a day after fellow congressional Republicans kicked off a national tour to build grass-roots support for abolishing the current income tax system.

Archer said the Ways and Means Committee will vote Oct. 22 on a plan to reform the IRS, fundamentally restructuring it and shifting control from the Treasury Department to a board that would include private citizens.

“If the Department of Treasury and its political appointees could have fixed the IRS, they surely would have done so a long time ago,” Archer said in explaining why he felt new people should be put in charge.

Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who also appeared on the GOP broadcast, said the bill will put “new people in charge who will hold the IRS’ feet to the fire and ensure that this powerful agency begins to work for the taxpayer.”

The Clinton administration is strongly resisting the bid to wrench control of the IRS from Treasury and turn it over to an independent board.

Clinton proposed his own set of reforms Friday, saying the IRS should be “more customer friendly,” but he stopped well short of relinquishing Treasury control.

Recent congressional hearings highlighted alleged abuses of taxpayers by the IRS that Clinton said left him “genuinely angered” and receptive to efforts to make the IRS easier to deal with.

But Archer urged more basic changes, including about 20 new protections like the right to sue the IRS. “The time has come to get the IRS off the backs of the American people,” Archer said, adding “the taxpayer shouldn’t have to work for the IRS.”