About 4.9 %of House, 3.2 % of Senate employees have an unpaid tax liability. Lawmakers have tax woes, too

Remember the alleged tax-dodging IRS workers? House and Senate employees — including lawmakers — make them look like model citizens.

It turns out that IRS employees have a much better record paying their taxes than lawmakers and their staff in both the House and Senate — almost five and three times better, to be exact, according to data released by the IRS on Thursday.


About 4.9 percent of all House employees, including lawmakers, have an unpaid tax liability. Those 486 employees owe Uncle Sam about $5.8 million.

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Across the Rotunda, Senate staff and legislators have a 3.2 percent delinquency rate, with 228 employees owing $2.7 million in taxes.

The IRS, which has a 0.9 percent tax delinquency rate, has come under fire in recent weeks when an agency watchdog found that it had paid $1 million worth of performance awards to about 1,100 IRS employees with tax-compliance problems.

Republicans pounced on the findings.

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Rep. Sam Johnson (Texas) and Sens. Pat Roberts (Kan.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), John Thune (S.D.) and Johnny Isakson (Ga.) all wrote the the IRS demanding answers, and some put forward legislation demanding the IRS recoup the bonuses and change its internal policies so delinquents can’t get bonuses.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has said the agency is in the midst of negotiating with its unions so that tax delinquent employees don’t get bonuses — a rule other federal agencies don’t have to abide by. Senior-level IRS officials already cannot qualify for bonuses if they have been subject to a disciplinary action.

The IRS notes that the delinquency rates include those who could be appealing or fighting in court the total on their tax bills, and folks who are in the process of paying their taxes in increments.

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Supervisors in all other agencies and departments beside the IRS would have no idea if an employee was tax delinquent when deciding whether to reward him or her with a bonus, according to the IRS. That’s because such information is protected under privacy laws.

The IRS is an exception and is held to a higher standard because of its role in tax collection.

It is not just legislative staff and leaders who are bigger delinquents compared with IRS workers.

The new data suggest other departments and branches of government have more workers with tax-paying woes than the IRS.

Among executive departments, Housing and Urban Development tops the list with a 5.3 percent delinquency rate, followed by the Veterans Affairs Department with a 4.4 percent delinquency rate.

Treasury has the lowest at 1.2 percent.

Independent agencies have some even bigger rates, though fewer employees and therefore smaller pots of cash owed.

The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency and the Government Printing Office have 8 percent delinquency rates; the Federal Reserve board, 6.5 percent — those are both about twice as much average delinquency rate as the federal government, which is about 3.3 percent.

That’s still better than the general public’s 8.7 percent rate, according to an IRS official.

The National Counsel on Disability has a 11.5 percent rate, though only 26 employees. And the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a 9.52 percent rate, but only 42 employees.