Do uncollected taxes grow as IRS employees dwindle?

That's the question raised by both the National Treasury Employees Union and Citizens for Tax Justice, according to an article in Federal Times.

Yesterday, the heads of those two organizations told reporters that:

• understaffing in many areas leaves the IRS unable to dent the $345 billion annual “tax gap” between owed and collected taxes/li>
  
  
• the proposed 2008 IRS budget of $11.1 billion is actually $546 million less than what was recommended by an independent IRS Oversight Board



• the IRS is failing to seek vast amounts of money in offshore tax havens



• the IRS policy now encourages agents to quickly close audits of large corporations.

According to the head of the Employees Union:

Short-changing this agency leads to out-of-whack enforcement. When the IRS doesn’t even ask for enough resources, it fails to direct resources toward the most complex cases and high-income taxpayers.

All of which goes to show that, while there's more than one way to skin a fat cat, there's also more than one way to save that fat cat's skin.