I.R.S. to Farm Out Back Tax Collecting Duties:

In response to the Bush administrations attempt to handicap the I.R.S in its efforts to collect delinquent taxes by drastically cutting the agency's workforce, the I.R.S. has decided to hire outside, private companies to begin the collection process for them. Anyone who owes back taxes of $25,000 or less will be pursued by these companies.

This will increase the costs of such efforts, making government even less efficient than it already is. But that seems to have been Republican policy dating back to the hypocritical Reagan administration. You will recall that Reagan campaigned on a promise to reduce government and to make it more efficient while doing just the opposite, creating the largest bureaucracy in history to that point, along with the largest increase in the national debt the country has ever seen.

According to The New York Times,

The private debt collection program is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, with the collection agencies keeping about $330 million of that, or 22 to 24 cents on the dollar.

By hiring more revenue officers, the I.R.S. could collect more than $9 billion each year and spend only $296 million — or about three cents on the dollar — to do so, Charles O. Rossotti, the computer systems entrepreneur who was commissioner from 1997 to 2002, told Congress four years ago.

I.R.S. officials on Friday characterized those figures as correct, but said that the plan Mr. Rossotti had proposed had been forestalled by Congress, which declined to authorize it to hire more revenue officers.

So here's the dirty little secret: The idea that privatization is the way to save American's money is at least sometimes a complete fallacy. The effort is really an attempt to funnel tax payers' money into private hands. Like the administration's lie about social security.