crossposted from
unbossed
Maybe the reason we end up with privatization - and privatization gone very bad - is that the Bush Administration has not learned to appreciate the all important role that a the zero plays at the right hand side of a number. How else to explain claims that privatizating a service would save $18 million - that's $18,000,000 - but it saved only $914,000. That's 1/20 the claimed savings.
This is the mathematical equivalent of the Rumsfeldian running of the Iraq War. Is it possible to make such a bad mistake by accident? Of course not, as you will see when you read on. And here too there would have been casualties. Hundreds of workers stood to lose their jobs based on this very bad math.
This latest saga of privatization gone wrong at the IRS involves its call center. This administration loves to privatize call centers, and they always result in poor service and no savings. This one is typical.
TheIRS Inspector General's report shows an absolute failure to save money - and the money saved only at the cost of seriously dis-serving the public:
Each year, millions of taxpayers call the IRS toll-free telephone lines to seek assistance in understanding the tax law and meeting their tax obligations. As part of a cost-reduction strategy, in FY 2006, the IRS planned to reduce its daily toll-free telephone hours of operation from 15 hours to 12 hours. Reducing the number of hours taxpayers are able to reach the IRS through the toll-free telephone lines could reduce costs; however, the savings are not as significant as the IRS projected. While the IRS could save approximately $914,000, approximately 2.5 million taxpayers (6 percent of the total FY 2005 volume) could be affected by a reduction in the number of hours they can obtain assistance through the toll-free telephone system.
Or maybe it was not a failure to understand the all-important role of the zero, but a failure to keep track of documents? Or to assume the best or the worst .. . .or whatever it wanted? Or to live in the reality based universe?
Or not to give a damn that hundreds of workers would have lost their jobs, that taxpayers could not get the help they needed, and that an agency's operations were hobbled . . . as long as the money flowed into the pockets of private contractors.
The report is truly damning. It finds that this decision to privatize was made:
* without any credible study,
* without any documentation to support the results,
* without even trying to understand when and why taxpayers called the IRS hotline, and
* with flawed documentation:
The IRS could not provide adequate documentation to support its decision to reduce hours. Therefore, we could not duplicate or validate many of the assumptions used. In addition, some of the documentation provided contained minor errors.
Additionally, steps were not taken to document the project's purpose, methodologies, or assumptions or to validate the data. While the IRS did conduct research over the Internet to determine posted hours of operation for several public and private organizations and did call several of them to question the assistors about their operating hours, the IRS did not contact management of those organizations to determine how or why those hours were selected. The IRS also did not pilot the reduction in toll-free telephone hours to test the validity of the assumptions or obtain taxpayer feedback. For example, it did not conduct focus groups to determine caller preferences or the impact that changing the hours would have on taxpayers.
And who, you might ask, who should we thank for saving the country and all of us from this disaster?
First, thanks go to the National Treasury Employees Union. If you click on that link you will see that the NTEU represents workers in critically important jobs and agencies.
Second, he National Taxpayer Advocate - a government agency set up to represent us when we have tax problems.
Yes, the only reason this disaster did not happen is thanks to concerns raised by the National Treasury Employees Union and the National Taxpayer Advocate over the impact of closing of Taxpayer Assistance Centers nationwide.
They lobbied Congress to enact legislation forbidding reducing taxpayer services until the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration had completed a study of the proposed changes. This is that study. And all their concerns have been proven correct. Without the efforts of a government agency and a public sector union, we, the country would have been worse off.
We should all send them some love. They've been living through very tough times.