David Pryor

Mr. PRYOR

Mr. PRYOR. I wonder if I could be allocated a minimum of 35 minutes.

Mr. PRYOR. I will take 40 minutes. I do not think I will use all of that time. I thank the Senator very much.

Mr. PRYOR. If it is all right with the Senator from Alabama, could we say no later than 5 o'clock?

Mr. PRYOR. Could not we vote no later than 5 o'clock?

Mr. PRYOR. I guess I will take at least 40 minutes. I hope I do not use it. I know my friend from Iowa wants to speak for 3 minutes on the issue. He can speak before I do, if that is all right with the distinguished managers.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, to conclude, my friend from Alabama has stated that the IRS has requested this. The IRS did not request this authority. This administration did not request this authority. The present IRS Commissioner did not request this new authority. In fact, the present IRS Commissioner has said she does not think it will work. She is raising the questions that, today, are unanswered. I hope that my colleagues from both of the committees and both managers--each of the managers, I should say, of this conference report will understand my voting ``no'' on this. It is nothing personal against them. But I am going to continue this fight to try to strike this from the law of the land when we adopt it.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I thank the Chair for recognizing me. Mr. President, in a few moments it is my understanding, according to the majority leader's request, that we are about to begin consideration of the conference report on the Treasury-Postal appropriations bill. That is my understanding. I think that will be coming to the Senate floor in just a very few moments. Mr. President, I want to remind my colleagues respectfully, notwithstanding the fact that the Senate in a voice vote knocked out a provision which was in the bill that came over from the House of Representatives, this provision has now been put back in during the conference between the House and Senate, and the final conference report including this provision is going to be voted on in a few moments by the Senate. Here is what this provision does: For the first time--for the first time--in the history of this great Republic, we are going to grant the authority for the Internal Revenue Service to privatize tax collections--for the first time. There are no guidelines. There are no ethics rules. There are no laws or regulations that pertain to this at this point. But we are going to be saying that we are going to put $13 million in for a pilot project to see how much law firms, lawyers, and private bill collectors can go out and collect from people who owe the Internal Revenue Service money. This was tried a few years ago, as far back as the ancient Greeks. Actually, this led, I might say, to this practice being labeled as ``tax farming.'' These tax farmers, Mr. President, became so very unpopular that ultimately they were beheaded. There is a lot written about this. There is a lot stated about this. We are about to commit the act of not recognizing our history nor realizing what this could do in the future of tax collections in this country. I have been advised, Mr. President, by those with great experience in parliamentary procedure--certainly greater than myself--that it will be impossible for this Senator or any other Senator to move that we recommit the conference report with instructions to the conferees. The reason is that there is no conference--the conference has disbanded. That is my understanding at this point. I hope I am wrong about that, but I think I am correct. Second, I then thought perhaps I would try something like a sense of the Senate or perhaps some other avenue of approach so that we could strike from this bill that particularly onerous provision that is going to send this country stepping toward tax farming and tax collections by the private sector against our own citizens. Mr. President, I have been advised that there is nothing that I can do at this moment to strike that provision, with the exception of just trying to talk about it and wait for another provision in another piece of legislation subsequent to this at the appropriate time. In a moment, I will continue this discussion. I will continue talking about why I think this is a very, very bad step, a dangerous step, a precedent-setting step, wading off into an area where we have no guidelines, no ethics protection, no protection for confidentiality to protect the taxpayers, something that I hope at the appropriate time we can strike from this particular piece of legislation. I thank the Chair for recognizing me. I yield the floor.

Mr. PRYOR. With no one else seeking recognition at this point, if I might, Mr. President, I would like to make a few points relative to this legislation and to one specific provision which bothers me to such a great extent that I will not only speak against this bill being passed, I will vote against this bill being passed, and I may be in a minority of one, but if that is the case I will be in that minority and be very proud of it. Historically, the Finance Committee, which is one of the oldest committees of this great institution, as is the Appropriations Committee, has not only been charged with tax collection but also charged with a very unique function in addition to that, and that function is the protection of the individual taxpayer. The protection of the individual taxpayer's rights has always, historically been a function not of the Appropriations Committee but of the Finance Committee of the Senate. On page 33 of the conference report that we are considering at this point--and that is the issue before the Senate--we find amendment No. 22. This is the same language that was stricken by the Senate on August 4, 1995, when the Senator from Alabama acquiesced in a unanimous- consent request for an amendment by myself, and the Senate knocked out the House language which stated this--I am going to read amendment No. 22, Mr. President. Restores and modifies House language authorizing $13 million for a private debt collection initiative. This is truly the tip of the iceberg. When my friend, Senator Grassley, of Iowa, a few moments ago was speaking about taxpayers' rights and the number of IRS agents that we are not going to employ, thus protecting the taxpayer, I went back many years ago remembering the work that Senator Grassley and myself and Senator Shelby, even in his days in the House of Representatives, were involved in by trying to get passed in the Congress the first-ever Taxpayer Bill of Rights, the first time that this country ever stated in statute rights specifically to protect the taxpayer. It was 1988 when this legislation was passed. And we are seeing today what I consider to be a great challenge to and a great erosion of the spirit of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. Why is that? First, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights had a very key provision. I am sure my friend from Alabama remembers--I wish my friend from Iowa were here because he helped to draft that particular section--we stated in 1988 that there could be no bounty system, there could be no quota system with regard to tax collections from the taxpayers of America. We found egregious example after example throughout the 50 States where tax collectors were abusing the rights of taxpayers, where they were abusing these rights to the extent that the tax collectors before 1988 operated under a bounty system and under a quota system whereby their raises and the structure of their civil service retirement, their opportunity in the work force was based upon, ``How much did you collect?'' Here is what we are doing now. For the first time in 200 years we are about to put our stamp of approval officially upon a bounty system. That is what this is. This is a bounty system where we cannot pay those lawyers to collect debts, where we cannot pay ABC Collection Service to collect debts of the IRS. There is no way we can put them temporarily on the Federal payroll. So we are going to pay them the only way there is to pay them: We are going to give them a percentage of what they collect. What sort of environment does that bring about? It does not take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. They are going to be out there using methods that are unprotected by statute, using a system of bounty hunter mentality that was in place before 1988, that is going to become the law of the land with the sanction of the U.S. Government. I think it is horrible that we would consider taking this very backward step and going back into the dark ages in the collection of our taxes. I received this letter August 4, and usually I am not on the side of the Internal Revenue Service. I chaired the Senate Finance Committee's subcommittee on oversight of the IRS for a good number of years. I worked closely with many of my colleagues on that committee and Members of this body. But on August 4, I received a letter from Margaret Milner Richardson, who is the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service at the Department of the Treasury, and I agree 100 percent. By the way, I ask unanimous consent to place this letter in the Record.

Mr. PRYOR. I thank the Chair. Mrs. Richardson wrote me this letter August 4, and I quote: I have grave reservations about starting down the path of using private contractors to contact taxpayers regarding their delinquent tax debts without Congress having a thorough understanding of the costs, the benefits and risks of embarking on such a course. Another quote from paragraph 2, and she is asking questions at this time. How would taxpayers rights be protected and privacy be guaranteed once tax information was released to private debt collectors? And that is a good question. Would the financial incentives common to private debt collection (keeping a percentage of the amount collected) result in reduced rights for certain taxpayers whose accounts had been privatized? Using private collectors to contact taxpayers on collection matters would cause unique oversight problems for the Internal Revenue Service to assure that Taxpayers Bill of Rights and privacy rights are protected for all taxpayers. Commingling of tax and nontax data by contractors is a risk as is the use of tax information for purposes other than intended. This is the end of that quote from the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service embodied in a letter to me dated August 4. How far will this go? Well, we might say it is only $13 million. They are going to go out there and experiment. We are going to hire a few collectors now, and maybe a few lawyers would be interested. They are going to go out there and try to collect some of the debts that are owed to the Internal Revenue Service. How far does it go? No one knows how far it goes because, Mr. President, there was not one day of hearings. There was not a hearing. There was not a discussion. There was not a debate. There was nothing. All we knew was that the House of Representatives inserted this language here. We struck it out in the Senate on August 4. I am hoping that we can defeat this bill so we can send a message back to the House that we are not going to tolerate this potential invasion of privacy, this potential invasion of confidentiality of private taxpayers' records and give those out to private debt collection companies and lawyers throughout the land. It is a terrible situation. The second question is, who are these people going to be? Are they just going to be lawyers? We just had the first version where we saw they were debt collection companies. Then it was expanded to lawyers. I do not know what it will be expanded to the next go-round. But now we have already expanded it once from debt collection companies to lawyers. I do not know how that happened. Who is going to be hired? Who makes that determination? Do they go up into the IRS office in Washington and say, ``We want to go back in our hometowns, and we know that that Ford dealer down there or that old farmer out there on route 4--I have a feeling that he probably owes the IRS something. We would like to see his records. And if you would show us those records of that Ford dealer or that farmer or that housewife or that small businessperson or that individual whom they may not like, ``for 50 percent we'll go out there and collect that money for you.'' Then is the IRS going to say, ``OK. You're hired?'' Someone else may come up and say, ``OK. You are not hired.'' Maybe they want too much money. Maybe they do not want enough. Who is going to train those people, Mr. President? My friend from Iowa, Senator Grassley, was talking about this massive bureaucracy of the IRS. I, too, have been critical of that bureaucracy. I think for too long it has been too insensitive. But who is going to train these people to go out and protect taxpayers' rights? That is what this argument is about. I do not know anything in the legislation that says that those rights are going to be protected. I know nothing in this amendment that says anything about the particular training program that these individuals are going to go through. All it says is, here is $13 million to go out and hire private collection agencies in the private sector. Who is going to train them? We do not know. Who is going to oversee them, Mr. President? Who is going to go down to Camden, AR, and oversee the Jones collection agency and see if they are properly giving the proper treatment and protection to the individual taxpayers that they are collecting money from? Who is going to oversee them? I do not know. New bureaucracy? Yes. Fewer taxpayers' rights? Yes. And now--this is a key and critical question, Mr. President--which taxpayers' cases are these individuals, once they are hired, once they are given their contract, which taxpayers' cases, when you file through all the records of the Internal Revenue Service, which ones are they going to be given to work on? Will it be at random? Will it be rural letter carriers as it was a few years ago? Will it be Methodist ministers? Will it be small businesspeople? Who is it going to be that they are going to zero in on? And this confidential information, confidential tax records, dating perhaps 10 years back, is it going to be given to the local collection agency so they can carry them around in the coffee shops, carry them around to the shopping centers and hold them up and say, ``Hey, look at our neighbors' tax collections for the last 10 years.'' Are we going to go out and get that system? As a result, we might collect 50 percent and make a nice profit on it. Mr. President, what type of taxpayer information will be made available? And how will this information be made available? And how will these tax collectors, these bill collectors, I should say, be paid? That has never been mentioned in this debate. Once again, Mr. President, this is an appropriations bill. It is not a bill that came from the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee is that committee historically that has been charged with regulating the protections of the taxpayer. And here we are making a very, very backward step, in fact a step back into the Dark Ages, in my opinion, when we are creating a new bounty-hunter mentality in the Internal Revenue Service. And it is an issue--I should say it is an authority, a new authority, that the Internal Revenue Service does not want. They do not think it will work. They are posing these many questions today as we consider this particular appropriations bill. Mr. President, I would like at this point to yield the floor. I would like the opportunity to ask some questions of my friend from Alabama. Perhaps he would like to respond. He may desire to do so at this time. I will yield the floor and retain the remainder of my time. Mr. SHELBY addressed the Chair.

Mr. PRYOR. I thank the Chair for advising me on the time remaining. I am going to speak only a few moments, Mr. President. I want to give adequate time for our friend and colleague, the distinguished Senator from West Virginia, to speak. I would like to hit two or three more points. I listened very intently to my friend from Alabama go down through the concerns as expressed by the Department of the Treasury, more specifically the Commissioner of the IRS, Margaret Milner Richardson, who wrote me on August 4--I placed that letter in the Record-- expressing grave concerns about going down this particular trail with debt collection. The Senator from Alabama has just mentioned that the IRS would still retain control throughout this whole process. I maintain that the IRS has control now. What we are about to do is to add a new dimension whereby confidential tax information of individual taxpayers, of small businesses and large, perhaps, are going to be taken from the confidentiality of the Internal Revenue Service and given, basically, to debt collection services, to lawyers and to law firms, and they are going to go out and collect these debts with a bounty hunter's mentality. It did not work centuries ago in Greece. It did not work in Rome. And, Mr. President, it is not going to work now, especially with the opposition of the agency, the IRS, that is going to be policing this situation, training these collectors and lawyers and, basically, having oversight of this whole new venture, in this leap that I think we are about to make into darkness. We are about to privatize the collection of debts by the Internal Revenue Service. There is some form of privatizing that may be all right. Yesterday, for example, when everything was closed down, I went down to the dining room. I walked down to the dining room, I knocked on the door, and the dining room was closed. So I decided, well, I have to eat somewhere, I had not had anything to eat. Somebody said, ``You can go over to the House of Representatives and eat; they have a cafeteria over there that is open.'' So I walked over, and I had two or three people with me. We walked through the tunnel and walked to the House of Representatives, and we ate. We ate because it was privatized. It was not run by the Government. Therefore, the Government did not have a lot to say about whether or not employees came in. But, Mr. President, privatizing a cafeteria and privatizing the confidential information to be dispensed to the general public and to lawyers and debt collectors are two different things. This is one area of privatizing that--even though many of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle might think it is appropriate--I beg them to reconsider, to look at the potential for conflict, for harassment, for bounty hunters, and for undue influence being used against unsuspecting and unprotected taxpayers. In 1988, in the taxpayers' bill of rights, we protected those taxpayers, I say to my friend from Alabama, and now we are about to walk away from them. We are about to say, well, we wanted to give you a little respite, but now we are ready to go after you again. We are ready to harness bounty hunters, who are going after you, who are going to have knowledge of your confidential tax information, where there are no ethics laws applying, and no regulations, where the IRS Commissioner says even the IRS cannot police this program. Mr. President, I ask, what are we doing? I hope we will reconsider this. I, for one, will vote against this conference report, even though I will probably be in the minority of one, and I hope that at the appropriate time, I am going to give this opportunity of the Senate itself to vote up or down on whether or not we should start privatizing the collections of our debts owed to the Internal Revenue Service. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, in the 1988 taxpayers' bill of rights, on which the Senator from Alabama was a helpful participant, we abolished the quota system. We said to the regional district offices of the Internal Revenue Service, you may not promote or demote your employees based upon what they collected or what they did not collect. We sent a message throughout the IRS collection system: No quotas, no bounties. The Senator from Alabama has just stated he hopes that they are paid on a percentage. That is a bounty. That is a quota. That is going directly contrary to the 1988 taxpayers' bill of rights.

Mr. PRYOR. Will my friend from Alabama yield?

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I want to ask my friend from Alabama, how are these new collectors going to be paid?

Mr. PRYOR

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I have the first motion to instruct the conferees, and this motion does, in fact, relate to the nursing home standards. Is it in order now?

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I send my motion to the desk to instruct conferees.

Mr. PRYOR

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I do not plan to use 8 minutes, but I would like to, basically, close my proposal that our conferees, when named, be instructed to keep the present standards for nursing homes this Congress adopted by an overwhelming bipartisan support in the great effort of 1987. I would like to talk about the substance of the difference between our proposal and the proposal as supported, evidently, by our good friend from Michigan and his colleagues on the other side. First, we are yielding two things in the Roth proposal that we voted for on October 27. We are yielding two things. The Federal Government, notwithstanding the fact that all nursing home residents--most of them, two-thirds--are Medicaid paid for, so there is a Federal involvement, a Federal attachment, but the Federal Government is saying, unless we instruct the conferees, unless we keep the present standards, the U.S. Government is saying in effect, we are giving up any protection or any regulations or any enforcement opportunities, notwithstanding the fact that nursing home residents are not treated fairly; that they are given poor food; that they are not clothed properly, they are not bathed properly. All this can take place, and if a State has a waiver, Mr. President, the Federal Government has given up that opportunity to enforce standards. The second major concept that I would like to talk about that my friend from Michigan has raised--and I thank my good friend from West Virginia who has been so strong in the movement behind keeping the strongest and strictest standards--is the concept of a State being able to adopt stronger standards. That is the law today. That is the beauty of the 1987 law. The Federal Government said, ``States, if you want to, you can adopt stronger standards than the Federal Government has.'' That is what we said to the States. There is a former Governor of a great State, a great Governor of the State of West Virginia. I was the Governor of Arkansas. I may not have been a very great Governor, but I was a Governor. I said, that makes sense. I said that in 1987, that makes sense. So today we give the States that opportunity to go forward to adopt any stronger standards they would like if they think that Federal standards are not sufficient. But if the States apply to HHS and the Secretary of HHS stamps that piece of paper and says you have a waiver, then the Federal Government is walking away from its powers to enforce, the Federal Government is walking away from its powers to regulate, and we are going to rue the day, because we are going to find ourselves back in the pre-1987 period of time when we saw that many of the nursing home residents were not being cared for, that they were not being protected, that there were too many bedsores, that they were improperly tied up, that they were improperly looked after, basically, Mr. President, and there is no reason--there is no reason--as Time magazine said, there is no reason for us to go back to the dark ages. There is no reason for it. There is no support for it. I can say, if we had the 2 million nursing home residents out there in our country voting as to whether they would like to have this extra amount of protection by the Federal Government, I think all of us in this body would know what that vote would be. I bet it would be unanimous, of all 2 million residents out there who would be saying, ``Thank you for that extra protection because my quality of life is being made better.'' Mr. President, this has been an issue for some weeks now that has basically been a very grave concern to many in this body and many in the other body, many organizations. But if I might, I would like to state just a few of the groups who have written in support of keeping the strongest standards: The American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the American Geriatrics Society; the American Health Care Association; the American Medical Directors Association; the Catholic Health Association; the Catholic Social Services Organization; the United Auto Workers, and actually a long list of individual nursing homes across our country that in the past you might have said, ``Well, these nursing [[Page S 16952]] homes would like to get by with no regulations.'' That is not the case. These regulations, these standards are uniform. They are true in every State. They are the same in every State. If I had a mother living today and she were in a nursing home in California, I could be living in Oregon and I would know exactly what those regulations were, because they are the same all over this country. We need to keep that. We should not obfuscate the nursing home regulations. We should not invite lawsuit after lawsuit to try to find out what these regulations meant. I have a letter from the National Senior Citizens Law Center. I ask unanimous consent that their analysis of the legislation, as proposed by Senator Roth, be printed in the Record.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, they have analyzed this particular issue, I think, as well as and as objectively and as fairly as they know how. They come down with the bottom line that we do not want to see compromised the safety, health, and the quality of life for the nursing home residents of the United States of America. Mr. President, I see no other Senator seeking recognition. Therefore, I yield the remainder of my time, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I do not think I have requested the yeas and nays. Therefore, I request the yeas and nays on my motion.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to temporarily lay aside the motion to instruct the conferees on the nursing home standards.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I may be allowed 2 additional minutes.

Mr. PRYOR

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, if I may respond to my friend from Massachusetts, I think he is precisely on point. He is exactly right. In addition, I might like to add just one more factor. I believe that something like 60 percent of all of the Social Security recipients are on a fixed income. They cannot go out and sell some more shoes or sell some more cars or do this or do that to increase their resources because they are locked in to an income. If we take this money from their Social Security by essentially adding a tax to their part B premium, and add it to the dilemma of trying to survive today, paying the costs of getting by, and paying the costs of food and the tremendous escalating costs of their medicines, we are going to impoverish many of our seniors today on Medicare. I want to salute the Senator from Massachusetts for bringing this to our attention. I wanted to elaborate to some extent on the number who were on fixed incomes.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I wonder if it is possible to put the Senate in a quorum call, not to have the time going against either side, for the time being? It will be very short.