House Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted on Friday that Congress will pass a bill April 15 -- the deadline for filing federal taxes -- making it a crime for IRS employees to snoop into taxpayers' files, the Associated Press reported.
A report on such activities in The Wall Street Journal last Thursday shows "how arrogant and how intrusive the IRS agents are getting," Gingrich told business leaders in his suburban Atlanta district.
The newspaper described the case of a Ku Klux Klan member who worked answering taxpayer queries on a toll-free IRS line and was convicted of snooping- related charges. A federal appeals court overturned the convic- tion, ruling such activity -- while "`reprehensible" -- was not a crime because prosecutors did not prove the information obtained from the files was used or passed on to anyone.
Since late 1994, more than 700 IRS agents have been reprimanded for unauthorized browsing in taxpayer files.
Reiterating past comments, Gingrich said there should be a 60 percent reduction in the number of IRS agents, with the resources used instead to beef up the Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Administration. He said there are 110,000 IRS agents, compared with 5,400 Border Patrol agents and 7,500 DEA agents.
"The federal government cannot stop illegal immigrants, it cannot stop drug dealers, but it can audit every small business in America," Gingrich said in his first speech since returning Wednesday from a four-nation tour of Asia.
The speaker also said he would like to see estate taxes eliminated. "There is something wrong, at a time when someone in your family dies, that you have to deal with the Internal Revenue Service the same time you're dealing with the funeral director," Gingrich said.
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