Congressman Darin LaHood was on the Jacksonville airwaves this morning to talk about several resolutions passed this week concerning the Internal Revenue Service.
Five such resolutions took place on Capitol Hill. LaHood has been an outspoken advocate of reforming the IRS, and just recently grilled its top man on cybersecurity issues.
One of the resolutions specifically focuses on prohibiting IRS employees who were fired for misconduct from being rehired by the IRS.“This week, we passed a number of measures that really work on how we reign in the IRS, how we force them to do their job, whether it’s customer service, whether it’s personal information, which is very, very important,” he says.
“It’s very hard to fire someone in the federal system. So, the bill we’ve passed this week, that will now go into the Senate, really just says, if you’ve engaged in misconduct, you cannot be re-hired by the IRS. That seems pretty simple,” says LaHood.
“The bill was very bipartisan, it passed 345 to 78. This hopefully ensures some integrity with the IRS, but, that’s something that should have been done a long time ago, but we finally got it done this week,” he adds.
Another resolution would prohibit the use of funds by the IRS to target U.S. citizens for exercising any right guaranteed under the First Amendment. Another measure would stop the IRS from hiring any new employees until it can certify that no employees are delinquent on their own taxes.
The house also passed a resolution ending bonuses until the IRS improves its customer service record, and a fifth measure would delete the IRS slush fund and re-assert Congressional powers over fees collected by the IRS.
You can hear the full interview with LaHood by clicking below:
