Half a Million of my Fellow Civil Servants are Deadbeats

It seems that The Honorable Congressman Charles B. Rangel (D-New York) isn't the only civil servant with a low regard for the Internal Revenue Service. According to WTOP News, there were 171,549 current federal workers who did not voluntarily pay their federal income taxes in 2007, and nearly half a million federal employees of all types - both active and retired, military and civilian - who are delinquent (see Federal workers owe billions in unpaid taxes).

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service is trying to collect billions of dollars in late taxes from nearly half a million federal employees.

Documents obtained by WTOP radio through the Freedom of Information Act show the federal employees and retirees did not pay more than $3.5 billion in taxes owed last year. The agency with the most delinquent employees was the U.S. Postal Service. Nearly 4.2 percent of its 747,000 workers are delinquent.

The IRS would not provide comparable data for the general population. The Executive Office of the President, which includes the White House, has 58 employees who did not pay more than $319,000. More than 1,000 Capitol Hill workers are on the list. About 152,000 of the delinquent federal workers have entered into payment plans.

The most interesting thing about this story is that the IRS tracks federal worker non-payment by agency. According to the agency-by-agency breakdown that is linked to the WTOP report, the biggest deadbeats are at the General Printing Office, at 7.23%. Guys, get your heads out of those books and file a 1040! The lowest rates of delinquency were among those goody-two-shoes at the Justice (1.72%) and Treasury (1.13%) Departments.

My own agency, the [REDACTED] [the foreign affairs department] was reasonably law-abiding with only 3.03% non-payers, and I'm sure they all had good excuses, like being deployed to Iraq. The Defense Department delinquency rate was up there, at 5.0%, and the rates for the CIA and FBI were mysteriously unlisted.