IRS Contractors Owe Millions in Back Taxes

Kevin Glass | October 23, 2013 6:57 PM

Internal Revenue Service Inspector General J. Russell George released a report today that found that the agency has not been following its own rules when it comes to employing contractors. The IRS requires its employees and contractors to follow federal tax law. (This is unique among government agencies, surprisingly.)

Needless to say, the IRS has not done a good enough job following its own rules:

Nearly 700 employees of Internal Revenue Service contractors owe $5.4 million in back taxes, said a report Wednesday by the agency's inspector general.
More than half of those workers are supposed to be ineligible to do work for the IRS because they are not enrolled in installment plans to pay the taxes they owe.
The inspector general's office reviewed tax records for nearly 13,600 employees of IRS contractors. Investigators found 691 who owed back taxes as of June 2012, the report said. Some 352 of the workers owed back taxes and were not enrolled in a payment plan, for a delinquency rate of 2.6 percent. Those workers owed a total of $2.7 million in back taxes, the report said.

That's millions that goes uncollected by the government agency responsible for collecting revenue because the agency cannot and has not kept a close eye on the contractors it uses.