The union representing IRS employees is warning that a proposed cut to agency funding will lead to fewer taxes being collected.

“Slashing the IRS budget by almost $840 million below the current level and $2.8 billion below the President’s request will further degrade its already impaired ability to provide taxpayers with the assistance they need and fairly enforce the tax laws enacted by Congress,” National Treasury Employees Unions President Colleen M. Kelley says in a press release.

NTEU-14-Obama-McCaskill-signs
IRS union members campaign for Democratic candidates.

The union claims the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government is proposing $10.1 billion for the IRS next year — “$838 million less than the current level.”

Kelley says the cuts would lead to “billions in foregone revenue.”

“This past filing season, the IRS was unable to answer almost 60 percent of taxpayer calls and people waited for hours in lines at walk-in centers across the country,” the union president reminds us.

The NTEU is “particularly concerned” about the impact further funding decreases could have on the IRS’ efforts to combat identity theft and other kinds of fraud.

Kelley claims the proposal would move $75 million to improve “customer service levels, identity theft refund fraud and correspondence-related response times,” and calls that idea “woefully adequate.”

And yet, it was Kelley who met with President Obama the day before the agency’s targeting of Tea Party groups began.

As The American Spectator reported in May 2013:

The very next day after her White House meeting with the President, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Report, IRS employees — the same employees who belong to the NTEU — set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America. The IG report wrote it up this way:

April 1-2, 2010: The new Acting Manager, Technical Unit, suggested the need for a Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager Agreed.

In short: the very day after the president of the quite publicly anti-Tea Party labor union — the union for IRS employees — met with President Obama, the manager of the IRS “Determinations Unit Program agreed” to open a “Sensitive Case report on the Tea party cases.” As stated by the IG report.

That apparently was an initiative worth the agency’s focus–arguably at the expense of other agency operations, such as customer service and combating identity theft.

And for all the fear mongering by the self-serving union, the federal government collected record tax revenues in fiscal 2014: $3,020,848,000,000.