congress if they would just give us more money we would do a better job. seriously, when you had that meeting and you put out that directive, what was it that you were trying to achieve? was it better morale? first of all we value customer service but when you cut the budget 1,000,200,000 and we lose 17,000 people we don t have enough people anyway. we have cut enforcement. if you don t have enough money to enforce the audits and the laws, as in some countries, people got to say the hell with the laws. it looks like to me that you are purposely harming taxpayers. right. can i answer that assertion? you agree that you have cut the use of taxpayer user fees to pay for customer steansz; is that correct? that money was moved to, in fact, fund the it necessary for implementing the statutory mandate that congress passed. the irs. the irs s choices and i would argue that they are choices on how to allocate resources have been deeply disappointing.
hink the answer is obvious. let s go to facebook.com/sean hannity. let us know what you think. that s all we have this evening. we ll see you back here tomorrow night. a tense faceoff on capitol hill over the irs. is the irs pinched for money or just reckless with yours? and tonight it only right here on the record, irs commissioner john koskinen and peter ross, the congressman both men going on the record in seconds. but, first you just may want to shake your head in disgust. bonuses, unions and he obamacare, that s what the irs is spending millions of dollars on all while ignoring your phone calls for help. in the height of tax season. congress has in fact cut our revenues and resources to a point that we are not as effective as we ought to be. you can t run around town and telling everybody you are out of money and that s the reason you can t do your job. these doggone people up in
lawyers and paying is thousand dollars an hour to outside law firm. congressman didn t tell us what law firm. all of this is happening in the context of obamacare. the federal government has made filling out taxes much more complicated for a lot of people. a lot of these calls are people who waited for hours and hours and didn t get any answer at all. not just the ones who waited a half an hour and got somebody. a lot of those were about a more complex tax system that they didn t understand. meanwhile, all this money going out only for bonuses but for taxpayer paid union activity. byron so much latitude given to the irs for their mistakes, for their inefficiencies for all a the problems they have. but one taxpayer made one tiny little mistake and they come down on the taxpayer like a ton of bricks just so unfair. one other thing we have been hearing about a number of the people at the irs say they don t go after people who owe less than $11 million. which is like a police departmen
less. john mccormick with the weekly standard and chief political correspondent for the washington examiner byron york. we are trying to put scotch tape and whole system back together. the problem is the irs is broken. top to bottom. the system is broken. i think so. john koskinen was supposed to come in there and clean stuff up. what we learned from the targeting scandal and previous testimony is that he seemed to be much more of a partisan guy who is just defending the president and playing defense all the time. arrests the congressman just laid out the funding level has stayed flat from last year and customer service went down double weight waited times. double bonuses reinstated predecessor the temporary commissioner wanted to get rid of those. once you get past the millions we are talking about. we need to look at the billions. that s actually the money that s going out fraudulently. billions of dollars earned income tax credit, additional child tax credit. if you got some
going to go after anybody who doesn t commit murder. they ought to read my email. there a lot of americans who email me and they are not feeling that way. they don t owe a million dollars in taxes. may seem like a million dollars for them because they need that money. congress needs to figure out a way to pay federal employees who make $1.3 billion in federal taxes. look at even garnishing their citizens. federal employees you work for the federal government you better pay your taxes. we should explain it. there have been reports a lot of federal employees. we no in who they are where they are. how much they are owed and their paychecks are held by the federal government but the irs just let s that one slide. it is good to see after we have seen so much of the politicization of the irs. and the whole targeting scandal to just see how badly things are going right now. and this committee has done a really good report and really good work on this. panel, stay with us. another terr