Recently in Tax Collection Category

Source: BY SUZETTE HACKNEY, FREE PRESS (MI), August 14, 2009

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is proposing to privatize two of the primary tasks of the city's finance department: the collection of taxes and the payment of the city's 13,000 employees.

Ed Cardenas, a Bing spokesman, said Thursday the city's antiquated systems -- some processing is still done manually -- make it difficult for payroll to function efficiently. He said the administration did not yet know how much the city could save by outsourcing those duties.

Source:By Robert Travis Scott, Times Picayune (LA), Tuesday, May 05, 2009

 

...... Another amendment that would let the state contract with a collection agency on a contingency basis would likely increase tax collections under the amnesty program well beyond the expense of hiring the outside firm, revenue Secretary Cynthia Bridges said.

A private firm would make more contacts with taxpayers by letter and phone than the agency would be able to handle, Bridges said. Similar amnesty programs in Indiana and Oklahoma collected about four times the amount originally targeted by using outside management firms, she said.

Source: By ELISE CASTELLI, Federal Times, September 21, 2008

A rare thing happened in January. Sixty-five Navy civilian employees at Puget Sound's Fleet and Industrial Supply Center in Washington state took over torpedo maintenance work that had previously been done by 85 contractor employees.

The Navy "insourced" the work -- as it is called when work is transferred from a contractor to in-house employees -- after it calculated it would save 10 percent of the cost, or $3 million over five years, of what it was costing to have BAE Systems do the work.

..........The Army has also insourced work. So has IRS and the Homeland Security Department. Such cases are rare, but if Congress gets its way, there will be plenty more insourcing going on in coming years at the Defense Department and across government.

...... The IRS announced this month it would take back 700 documents management jobs it outsourced last year to a contractor.

........ In a document obtained by Federal Times, the IRS declared it was canceling the contract and bringing the 700 jobs back in house "in the interest of putting a long-term solution in place and doing so in the most cost effective manner." The document didn't say how much the agency would save by reversing its outsourcing decision.

Source: Accounting Web, September 30, 2008

Another in a series of reports by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) underscores continuing and significant problems with use by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of private debt collectors, the leader of the union representing IRS employees said today. "TIGTA's most recent report, dealing with contractor and IRS implementation of procedures covering the private collection of federal taxes, highlights serious issues with the taxpayer complaint and concern process," said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).

..... One of the most serious concerns raised in the TIGTA report, which covers the period from April 2007 through February 2008, deals with the validity of customer service survey data provided by the private collectors.

...... There also is growing bipartisan congressional opposition to continuing the IRS use of private tax collectors--and, among others, the IRS's own National Taxpayer Advocate repeatedly has called for an end to the program.

Source: JUSTIN ENGEL, THE SAGINAW NEWS (MI), Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Saginaw City Council members approved a three-year, $225,000-per-year contract for a makeover of the controller's office.

The city will hand the reins to Plante & Moran, an accounting firm with 10 Michigan offices, Tuesday, July 1.

The move eliminates four positions in the controller's office and shifts work to at least two of Plante & Moran's workers, City Manager Darnell Earley said.

Officials estimate the three-year deal will save the city about $150,000. Saginaw needs to privatize some operations to save money and fix years of inadequacies in the quality of the work, supporters said.

Source: By Dan Keating, Washington Post (DC), Thursday, May 22, 2008; B01

A consultant for the District Office of Tax and Revenue has been paid more than $2 million in improper charges, including airfare to Puerto Rico, cable television bills, $3,000 apartment rentals and management retreats, Auditor Deborah K. Nichols said yesterday.

The auditor also said that hourly labor rates were too high, annual increases were too large, millions of dollars worth of additional work was tacked on and managers under Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi failed to properly oversee consultant Accenture's work for the tax office.

Accenture has been paid about $135 million since 1998 to create the Integrated Tax System and run the computers, including ongoing fees of $5 million per year.

Source: By Dan Keating, Washington Post (DC), Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The tax manager charged as the mastermind of the biggest fraud in the District's history helped play a role in designing the agency's computer system while she was allegedly stealing millions of dollars a year, current and former employees said.

Following Harriette Walters's input, officials left her small unit out of the new software system, making it easier for her to escape detection as she allegedly produced fake checks that prosecutors say amounted to $50 million.

Directors in the scandal-plagued tax department now want to scrap the $135 million system rather than try to upgrade it to make it more secure. The chief financial officer's technology manager says the system, installed between 2000 and 2004, is too outdated and clumsy to be worth fixing.

Before her arrest in November, Walters was a 26-year tax employee known among her colleagues as a problem solver with a knack for finding solutions by using the department's antiquated and balky computers or finding a way around them. Although she did not have final say over the new Accenture Integrated Tax System, Walters contributed to the decision that her unit, which handled real estate tax refunds, be left out of it.

Source: By Dan Keating, Washington Post (DC), Thursday, May 22, 2008

A consultant for the District Office of Tax and Revenue has been paid more than $2 million in improper charges, including airfare to Puerto Rico, cable television bills, $3,000 apartment rentals and management retreats, Auditor Deborah K. Nichols said yesterday.

The auditor also said that hourly labor rates were too high, annual increases were too large, millions of dollars worth of additional work was tacked on and managers under Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi failed to properly oversee consultant Accenture's work for the tax office.

Accenture has been paid about $135 million since 1998 to create the Integrated Tax System and run the computers, including ongoing fees of $5 million per year.

Source: Associated Press (DC), May 6, 2008 - 8:46am

The D.C. finance office will scrap a $120 million computerized tax system that was strongly criticized by auditors.

According to a report obtained by The (Washington) Examiner, the automated system routinely fails and forces workers to create duplicate reports by hand. The report says the system has left the city open to corruption and cost millions of dollars in uncollected revenue.

A spokesman for Accenture says auditors hired by the city did not understand the high-tech system, which led them to make critical errors.

Source: DAN WALTERS, Sacramento BeeScripps News (CA), April 4, 2008

A California employee union is complaining about an embryonic scheme in the state Board of Equalization to hire one or more private collection firms to track down those who owe taxes to the state.

The Service Employees International Union says the state's own tax collectors could do the job just as well, for far less cost, if they were equipped with up-to-date tracking tools.

...... Just a couple of months ago, for instance, LGBS was fired by the city of Chicago after it was revealed that it had bankrolled a vacation trip for the city official who oversaw its contract to collect unpaid parking fines, which had generated $33.6 million in commissions for the firm.