After learning that more than 450,000 federal workers and retirees owe a whopping $3 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, the Senate Finance Committee is urging the president to step up efforts to collect from those delinquent employees.Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., and ranking Republican member Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to President Bush requesting that he remind the delinquent federal employees and warn them of the consequences of non-compliance.
The IRS told Baucus and Grassley that as of October 2005, about a third of the 450,000 had installment agreements with the IRS to pay roughly $1 billion in delinquent taxes. The remainder owed more than $2 billion, though some of the workers included in this group were reportedly in bankruptcy, on active military duty or trying to reach payment agreements.
There are a total of about 9 million federal employees.
