Date: 1997-04-10
Speaker: LINDA SMITH (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Washington

Mr. Speaker. this time of the year always brings back memories to me. because for nearly 15 years I was up to my nose in tax returns and trips to IRS for clients. In my other world. I prepared tax returns and taught the changes of the law to tax preparers. It always disturbed me when I would go to Internal Revenue with the expertise of the agents. not all of them but many. but also the amount of information that they had about our private lives. So you can imagine that it was more personal for me when Tuesday of this week I got a report that IRS had been snooping again. You see. several years ago there was a report that there was a lot of private snooping going on in private records of individual citizens. some celebrities. some people just like me. by Internal Revenue agents. For what purpose. I do .not know. Some were convicted. Not many. But it was a pretty extensive report. And IRS promised us at that time. whether we be citizens or people that represented citizens before IRS or preparers. that they would stop doing it. that they would rein this practice in and protect the privacy of the ordinary American citizen. Well. this Tuesday. the document release says they are not doing it. In fact. it was so serious it showed that in 1994 and 1995 alone. there were documented 1515 cases where employees were accused of misusing computers. snooping. Now. the sad part about this is there were not very many firings. It says in the report that they counseled most of the employees. 472 were counseled. 349 were disciplined. but it does not appear in anything other than a hand slap. Only 23 were fired. Now. in our country the right to privacy and protection of our private lives is very. very important. That is what makes us America. Mr. Speaker. we should not have the servants of the people. whether they be police. FBI. whatever. but especially not IRS. violating our privacy. Next week we will have a bill on this floor that will take care of that. We are not going to put it into a study. We are not going to trust IRS to say. we will do it if you wait. We are going to tell them that they are going to do it. But how we are going to do it is this way: We are going to say. if you snoop. you have civil penalties and criminal penalties. If you snoop and tell. which is really awful. but that has happened. you talk about the private lives of citizens. you can go to jail even if you are an IRS employee. Why should they be any different than any other citizen? They are just servants of the people. Next week is also going to focus on something that has been the compelling issue that brought me into politics originally in the early 1980s. In the early 1980s. it was actually a State tax increase that doubled the taxes on my small business. I never had more than 125 employees at any one time. but I faced. with regulation and a doubling of my small business tax. laying off employees. It got my attention. And I realized that American families. whether running a small business. like me. or my employees. could be hurt by government not being able to control spending. You see. what I saw was our State had doubled their spending percentage nearly regularly over 20 years. What that means is every 2 years the spending increase was 20 percent. 10 percent a year. while the peoples ability to pay got up 3 to 5 percent a year. And as that happened and government grew. it was so easy. you see. to raise taxes instead of control spending. that what we faced were ordinary people. like me. running a small business in Vancouver. WA. facing taxes that we were having one heck of a time paying. So I ran for office and got mad. I ran for office and I kept changing things. I ran an initiative in our State that said we will control spending and will make it tougher to raise taxes. It always should be a little tougher to raise taxes than to tax the American people. whether it be at the State or Federal level. than to increase spending. because you cannot tell a bureaucracy no. Mr. Speaker. we passed that as an initiative in our State. And guess what? The spending growth is now 5 percent a year for the public government. and it is more in line with the ability of the people to pay. This worked. It will work when we pass the same measure next week. On the floor next week will be a supermajority to raise taxes. And it worked in our State. It will work in our Nation. And I encourage watching for that vote and see how Members of Congress vote.