better. with 2% growth and 4% growth, you can begin to solve some of these deeper social problems. thank you very much, panelists. >> thank you, rich. [ applause ] coming up tonight on cspan-3, with a tax deadline tomorrow, we speak with nina olson. then the u.s. hosts a talk on u.s. dependence on foreign oil. after that, prescription drug abuse and the release of those drugs to rural markets. on tuesday the subcommittee on human rights and civil rights will hold a hearing on racial profiling. senators will examine the impact of newly enacted immigration laws, anti-terrorism efforts and law enforcement practices across

the country. watch that at 10:00 a.m. eastern tuesday on cspan-3. ret trial of former pitcher roger clemens. he lied to congress in february 2008 on performance-enhancing drug use in baseball. >> let me read to you what his wife said in her affidavit. i, laura petit, do depose and state in 1999 or 2000, andy told me he had had a conversation with roger clemens in which roger admitted to him using human growth hormones. mr. clemens, once again, i remind you you're under oath. you have said your conversation with mr. petit never happened. if that was true, why would laura petit remember him telling her about the conversation? >> once again, i think he misremembers it.

andy and i's relationship was close enough to know that if i had known that he had done hgh, if he was knowingly knowing that i had taken hdh, we would have talked about the subject. he would have come to me to ask about the effects of it. >> watch his 2008 testimony on line at the cspan library. over 2,000 public affairs on your computer. nina olson is the irs national taxpayer advocate. thank you for being here. >> thank you. >> taxes are due tomorrow at midnight. >> yes. >> what is the biggest problem with the american tax code? >> oh, dear. its complexity. i think that's what presents the most difficulty for taxpayers is really trying to figure out whether they've got the right answer or not on their income tax returns, and the complexity causes that. >> explain your role because you are based within the irs but you have a lot of independence.

the christian monitor has a profile of you today called the irs code talker. what do you do as the code talker? >> my job was created by congress, and it requires me to be the voice of the taxpayer inside the irs. there are four prongs to my office: help taxpayers solve their problems with the irs, then identify the administrative and legislative causes for those problems, and then make recommendations to mitigate those problems. >> and what are the biggest missteps that people make on their tax returns. is there anything standing out this year? >> i don't think there is anything in particular this year. last year we had a lot of problems with the first homebuyer credit. this year i think what taxpayers experience are some of the delays in refunds that have to do with some of the processing processing issues we've had. >> if you have a question for

nina, 1-877-275-7505. we'll also put on the screen the phone number for the irs advocate case hotline. how do people come about getting ahold of you and your services, and how does that all work? >> a taxpayer qualifies for our services when they experience a significant hardship. a significant hardship is where something the irs is doing or not doing or about to do could cause you economic problems, serious economic problems like levying on your bank account, garnishing your wages and you can't pay your bills. or you've tried to solve the problem with the irs and you haven't been able to get it done. so it just, you know, drags on and on and on. either one of those ways is a way to get into my organization. you call that number, and then what happens is we assign you a case advocate. so it's one of the few, if only, places in the irs where one person is working your case from start to finish.

>> i'm looking at this graphic from the christian science monitor. federal tax law keeps piling up, and it shows the number of pages in the u.s. tax code and related federal explanatory material. that's back in 1913. there are about 400 pages now, 20 in 2012, over 73,000. >> there were really only a few thousand taxpayers back in 1913, and it was about 353,000, and it expanded in 1944 when we got withholding and the ramp-up of the war effort to about, oh, 43 million, and today we have 141 million. and i guess the pages of the code have increased to the extent that, you know, the taxpayers have. we calculated there are over 500 changes to the tax laws in 2010, which is more than one a day. which is just crazy and goes back to what i said earlier. taxpayers don't know what's in

the law and whether they're getting the right answer or not. >> let's go to the phones and hear from mark joining us from norfolk, virginia. independent line. hi, mark. >> good morning to you. miss olson, i just recently had some interaction with your office, as a matter of fact, i'm waiting for a return response. i would say as my first experience with you all, it was an awesome one with your office out of denver, colorado. i'm not one of these ones to beat a drum saying government should be small, but in the case of the irs, that's an organization that is just so bureaucratic and huge where the toe is not connected to the foot, the foot is not connected to the ankle, and it can get so frustrating in trying to make a call even if you give up your t.i.n. if you're business, your social if you're individual.

it's almost like you're out of state. has the irs truly looked at the possibility of streamlining the process, and certainly, if you could get rid of all of the pages by pages by pages, i think between -- you could shrink the government size, one; two, make the paperwork simple, i would think there would have to be some savings on the table, and i'll just take your comment off line. >> mark, are you still with us? >> yes, i am. >> why didn't you reach out to her agency? >> in all of my tax years, i had an issue in '06 where they asked, you know, for me to be audited. my issue now, and actually, i even tried to e-mail miss olson. my issue now is i wasn't able to make my audit day, and i'm begging for an audit. i'm actually saying, please come audit me so i can get this issue behind me, and i've contacted her d.c. office, i sent an e-mail to someone there --

>> mark, nina has a question for you. >> i don't want you to give me your information over the phone, but perhaps you could share the person handling the phones your information so i can get back to you or my staff can get back to you personally. i'm sorry that you've had a difficult time. i'll respond to your answer off line -- your question when you're off line. with respect to how my office works, we don't have the power to do the audits ourselves. what we have to do is get the irs to do what the taxpayer needs. and sometimes, you know, we are pushing up against that very same bureaucracy that you yourself described, and i will, for your particular case, make sure that things are taken care of. the larger question that you had about the size of the irs and then the complexity of the law, you know, one of the things i've been seeing, the irs a

100,000-person organization. slightly less because it's been shrinking in the past few years. like i said earlier, we've grown from 353,000 taxpayers to 141 million taxpayers, which is a huge percentage of taxpayers per irs employee, and actually, we have fewer employees per taxpayers than most major tax systems in the world. now, i think that we could do a lot more in working efficiently and effectively, and actually, what i think would streamline things much more is if the irs would actually pick up the phone and talk to taxpayers before they do a lot of these actions that then later they have to undo, like assessing tax or putting levies on taxpayers' bank accounts before they've actually talked to a taxpayer to find out whether they could make a payment arrangement or whether it would cause economic harm. once they do the levy, then we have to unwind it.

so we're spending an awful lot of time, you know, taking actions that we have to unwind when we could have been using that energy and that time to call taxpayers proactively, or in your case, scheduling an audit when it worked for the taxpayer as well as for the irs. and that's one of the things that we've been really pushing. i'll say one more thing, which is that a lot of people who promote like a national sales tax or getting rid of the tax code, getting rid of the tax code as we know it, they say, well, we'll get rid of the irs, then. and i think that that's very naive. with sales taxes, you still need someone to collect the tax. so we're never going to get rid of the irs, but we do need it to work better and we need it to communicate better with its taxpayers and be much more open and receptive to what taxpayers have to say. >> kim joins us from marshfield,

wisconsin, republican line. good morning. >> caller: yes, hello. my question is, wouldn't it greatly simplify the tax code if the corporate income tax was completely eliminated and all interest dividends, capital gains be taxed as income, and this fairness issue, then, would go away and we would have a better economy because corporations aren't under the pressures of congress and the tax code? >> well, i think that's a very -- that is a proposal that many people have suggested integrating the corporate and the individual income tax. and, in fact, in the law today, there is a type of corporation. the subchapter-s corporation where the losses and revenues are passed through the shareholders but it still has the corporate limited liability.

you still have to calculate the corporation's net income. so even having no taxation on a corporation and taxing income, dividend, profits, losses to the individual shareholders, you would still have to figure out, what is that corporation's net income? so that certainly gives us lots of opportunity to create lots of laws and lots of preferences and things like that. there will still be some rules about corporate income, so i don't think you get away from that problem. but it is one of the proposals that a lot of, you know, thinkers about tax policy and economists, you know, have put on the table for the last 20 years, even longer. >> eddie writes on twitter and says that you remarked the tax code changes at least once a day. is that because of economic necessity or change for the sake of change? >> some of the provisions are maybe technical corrections, but

others are very tiny, little specific provisions that address some groups' need. and there are just a lot of groups. >> let's hear from marjorie, democratic caller in pittsburgh. good morning, marjorie. >> caller: oh, hello. this sounds strange, but i don't think i'm paying nearly enough taxes. i receive a lot of my income for dividends, maybe 40%, and if you work the qualified dividend worksheet, you come out with a much lower tax rate, and i don't think that's fair. it's a huge loophole, and i've tried to reach different people about this, like finance committees on the house and the senate, and i don't know if this will ever come out to the fore, but it's a big revenue loss, in my opinion, and even though it may be against my better interest, i don't think it's fair for me to be paying these

lower taxes. i talked to a cpa and she said, well, if the irs doesn't come after you if you don't take the worksheet, maybe you could use this money for charity or support different candidates and that kind of thing. so i don't know what you're thinking about this. >> well, you know, my office doesn't do tax policy, and the issue that -- we work on tax administration, how the irs treats taxpayers and how the law makes it difficult for the irs to treat taxpayers well because it's so complicated. the issue that you raise really is about should you pay a higher or lower rate on different kinds of income like dividends or capital gains versus wages. and that is definitely today, if you read the news as you read the news, very much a hot issue. so i think there will be opportunities coming forward as you're in the election year and things like that where people will be talking about that very

issue. i would say that, you know, those preferential rates cause complexity in the code. you just described having to go through a worksheet, and each one of those things increases the likelihood that someone would make a mistake, either for the taxpayer or against the taxpayer. >> nina olson is the national taxpayer advocate. the taxpayer advocate service is an independent tax service in the irs that helps taxpayers. taxes are due tomorrow at midnight. yesterday was sunday, today is a holiday in the district of columbia. i have a picture here of the celebration going on. d.c. mayor, vincent gray delivering a speech yesterday. it's the 150th anniversary of d.c. emancipation day. it's not the day taxes are due. instead tomorrow. have people procrastinated more or less because they have two extra days? >> i don't think two extra days

promotes pro contrakrprocrastin. we have a spike in the middle, people are getting their w-2's, and then spike number 2, people tend to wait until the last minute. then we have a lot of people who are having to file extensions partly because more people than ever are invested in mutual funds, in sotock accounts and things like that, and often they don't get the correct information from those brokerage houses or financial institutions until very close to the filing deadline, so to be safe, they file an extension and then they have until october 15. so our third spike, i guess, is october 15. >> the christian science monitor profiled this week, 60% of all individual taxpayers hire

someone to do their taxes for them. 19 out of 19 tax prep outlets visited by federal auditors posing as taxpayers in one city in 2006 made mistakes on tax returns, and 17 of them made significant mistakes. >> that was the government accountability office. they did a really interesting sort of shopping visit where they went to 19 preparers, and some of the scenarios really involved people having some cash income. and they asked the preparer whether they needed to report that income. in many cases the preparer said, no, no, you don't have to. and in one instance, the taxpayer/gao employee kept saying, don't you think i should, don't you think i should, and the preparer basically said, the irs will never know you've got it so you don't have to report it. that led to that plus some of the recommendations we made start ng 2002 led to something that recently happened, the regulation of this whole group

of preparers who are not attorneys, not cpas, not group-enrolled agents who take a test to practice before the irs, so they're now having to register before the irs, all preparer preparers, and starting this year they'll have to take a test to prepare all returns and they'll have to have continuing education. it is amazing to me that it took that long, from about ten years, really, to get people to recognize how important it was to have some kind of licensure, if you will, because taxpayers were being very harmed, as the evidence shows. >> why don't the irs have to pay anything for businesses that are doing all of the work of collecting taxes? it's a lot of the work. >> we have a compliance rate of 83.6%. that's the best estimate that

we've got. what's really driving it is the fact that businesses around the united states are withholding on their employees' paychecks and paying that money in to us. that is really what gets us, that high compliance rate. and i've often thought as we talk about, well, we can impose more withholding or we can do this or we can do that, that we're really putting it on the skbisz some of our proposals have been, you might want to think about giving some type of rebate to the businesses if they pay early or if they pay when you're talking about procrastinators, rather than wait until the 15th, if you pay on the 1st, a lot of states do that with sales tax. they let you deduct 1% of the sales tax due if you pay before the 15th of the month. i've been thinking about things like that to recognize the additional burden that businesses are bearing in order for us to get this high rate of compliance that we have. >> what kind of freedom do you have to think about issues like that?

the christian science monitor story, which also calls you the tax whisperer, looks at your independence and notices sometimes you raise things that congress, the white house, really don't want to talk about or think about. >> i think i've probably made everybody angry at one point or another. i think that i came into this job thinking that, you know, i had a great deal of experience with taxpayers and what i really needed to do was continue to listen to them. and i took that very seriously. my job is being their voice. now, i happen to have opinions, too, and i look at the things that i think are important after having listened to taxpayers, and i have an independent viewpoint, and i really do take that independence seriously. which meant that i've disagreed with my direct boss, the commissioner, and my next direct boss, the secretary of treasury, and the big boss, the president, and the people who have overseen

and created my office, congress. it's just what comes with the job. >> nina also joined the irs as a tax advocate back in march 2001. she serves as an advocate and leads the taxpayer advocate service to about 2,000 taxpayer advocates. she also helped americans resolve their tax problems and worked with the irs to protect procedural in the doed. she practiced private tax law and owned and operated accounting tax and information sfz, planning prep service. in jackson, ohio, michael, a republican. good morning. >> caller: good morning. >> hi. >> caller: i have two questions. i just heard a case on the radio where the irs was taking an individual to court and was essentially trying to seize his property in tax court. he took them to federal court

and won a judgment roughly six years ago which said for anyone, including the government or even the irs to see somebody's property, they actually had to go to court, to tax court. my second question involved something i've always wondered abo about, i had heard many moons ago, that the statement that you see on tax forms says that if you don't pay your taxes, the irs has the authority to garnish your wages, but i found on the internet someplace, that's like paragraph a. paragraph b says, but the federal government can only do that if you are a federal employee. so that's my question. thank you. >> the first question, actually, congress made it clear that in order for the irs to actually do a seizure of, i would say, tangible property, real

property, other than a levy, that they did have to go to federal district court. there is an administrative foreclosure and seizure process, a foreclosure process, and there is an administrative seizure process. however, the united states tax court has jurisdiction over cases called collection due process cases. this was a provision that came in in 1998 which said, before the irs can levy upon property, whether it's your bank account or your wages, the first time it's trying to do it with respect to any tax. the taxpayer had to be given a hearing. the opportunity to ask for a hearing before an appeals officer. if you didn't like the results of that hearing where you got to present alternatives to that particular collection action, you could go to the united states tracks court. so the united states tax court over. as far as levying, the irs h

has -- if outside out nitd states, must go to a court and get a judgment before it levees on the bank accounts or seizes stock or any of those things. the irs can go ahead under its statutory administrative levy authority without a judgment and take action as long as you've bep noticed, notified that the tax has been assessed and that a demand has been made for payment. and that is the statutory framework. again, after you've gotten that notice and demand, the first time the irs wants to levy on your account, you get the right to have a collection due process hearing in which you can raise alternatives to that collection. if you like the results at the administrative hearing, you can go to the united states tax

court. >> jim asks to twitter, what's the advertising budget for your department? >> it's about 200 some odd million, close to 300 million employees. i've got 2,000 employees throughout the united states. i have 75 offices. congress required us to have one herself, they're states like texas, california, new york -- we have more than one office in those states so we can be around the people. >> based on your experience, how much of the resistance to tax simplification is the consequence of a large granted, the irs wouldn't go away but you might have fewer employees. >> i think that is a complete miss son sepgs of who makes the laws. i have people saying, "the irs

code." do you really think the irs would write a code like this. it's very difficult to administer. irs administers it. the president proposes laws, but the isn is way down there in terms of the tote many positivel positively. >> reporter: one of the thirgs things i oof with was the subject of i a child. before you even got, poum depend do you have, are you entitled to child care credit. one of my utilization form of a child. even something as simple as that, that everybody made perfect sense. it took nearly to crede back in.

vivian shares your desire for clarity and writes in saying, the irs does not write the tax point. good coke. >> i just had a couple comments. i think a lot of the anks that people have in going to the irs is because they're not prepared for what -- if you go to the same repair year after year and you have a history, instead of having bubld. my husband and i went through an audit. i knew my. -- she actually has been any taxpayer for ten years. she knows my history.

and met with ms. yolanda murray. she was amazing. i found that every party i dealt with in that office, it made. i produced the backup early. and it won't are prepared and go into it as if the iht. just want you to pay what the law is and if we do our due diligence on there, we'll be fine. >> the christian science monitor reports 110 million, over 25,000. she described an office exam, and in fact, there are very few office exams where you go into the irs office or the irs comes out and talk to you.

the 78% of all individual audits, every year, are done by correspondence. so the situation that she described is actually a really great situation because you're actually sudden with your documents and you're able to have a give and take and go back and forth. in these correspondence exams, there are no person. you get these cryptic letters back -- the first letter. these were surveys of. when they got their audit letter in these correspond not ex exams, they did not know they were under audit. >> fering at your