Federal workers owe taxes! What? That’s right, many federal workers and retired federal workers owe some serious taxes. In his article, “Federal workers owe more than $3.5 billion in unpaid taxes,” Stephen Ohlemacher tells us in an Associated Press article:
“Federal workers and retirees owed more than $3.5 billion in unpaid taxes last year, a $200 million increase over the previous year, the IRS said Tuesday…Almost 305,000 federal workers and retirees owed back taxes as of Sept. 30. That’s down from 318,000 the year before.”
“It is an honor and a privilege to serve in the federal workforce,” said Rep Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. “These employees are not exempt from their civic responsibility to fulfill tax obligations…”
I suppose it is good news that 15,000 more federal workers paid their taxes last year. Still it is kind of a double bonus for many others in government. We (that’s all of us taxpayers) pay their salaries and then hundreds of thousands of them don’t pay the taxes they owe!
You might be interested in knowing that the biggest offenders are the folks at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, while workers at the Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, has the lowest delinquency rate
“In Congress, House employees had a higher delinquency rate than Senate workers. About 5 percent of House employees owed back taxes, compared to just 3.5 percent of Senate workers.”
The same political guys who often want us to pay more in taxes aren’t always paying taxes themselves. I was not at all surprised to learn that the good men and women of our military owe just 1.4 percent in back taxes.
In regard to the IRS employees we mentioned above, it is true they have a low delinquency rate, but that’s also because their internal rules and regulations don’t always require them to report the delinquencies to those of us in the “outside world. “In other words, we really don’t know the true percentage.
$3.5 billion is a lot of money
There have been suggestions that legislation should be passed to terminate federal employees who do not pay their taxes. It is not a bad idea, but it is also not a solution. The solution is ethics training at all levels of government, but we will get to that in a minute.
The mindset of some government employees (and unfortunately, I know this for a fact) is that the money they utilize is like a water spigot with an unlimited amount of water. There is often a failure to understand that we all pay into a large pool and everything must come out of that pool.
The government employee mindset, I am afraid, may not always translate into the fact that they too utilize government services. An employee at USDA who is in charge of monitoring potato bugs, or some such things, may need disaster relief if her house blows away in a hurricane. We just never know about such things.
Federal workers, like the rest of us, need everyday services. They are part of this great country. Three-and-a-half billion dollars is an awful lot of money. We could use it.
It leads me to the ethical part of this discussion. Federal employees may not always understand that they are consumers. What we take out, we have to put back into the equation. Good ethics dictate that we pay our taxes – like them or not.
What I would propose is an ethics program attached to each government agency at the local, regional and federal levels. The program must teach that ethical behavior is reciprocal; if the “citizens,” that’s us, are required to meet a certain set of obligations, the same obligations are required of federal, state, regional and local government workers.
I maintain that ethics training can do things that dull and dry rules and regulations cannot. Ethics training can open up dialog, a very powerful thing. We are able to share and to understand and to iron out issues in real-life situations and scenarios.
If nothing else, ethics training for workers government can spark a sense of responsibility and the trading of ideas. While I am not naïve (I know there will always be those who are delinquent), I also know that for others, the ethics training will provide a context.
In the end, everyone must realize we are all in this together. Sometimes ethics provides the cement to keep us connected.
