Anything David Cay John­ston writes for the New York Times is worth read­ing, and his arti­cle today on the Con­gres­sional tes­ti­mony of Nina E. Olson, the national tax­payer advo­cate, is no excep­tion. In the space of a single two-​column arti­cle, he gives us more hard infor­ma­tion than we can get in a week’s worth of primary-​season pun­ditry. In today’s arti­cle we learn that:

1/ Olson has pro­posed “apology payments” rang­ing from $100 to $1000 that would be used to com­pen­sate tax­pay­ers who endure “excessive expense or undue burden” on their time as a result of I.R.S. mistakes.

2/ The gov­ern­ment could col­lect $100 bil­lion or more in taxes on the cash econ­omy by track­ing credit card pay­ments, state sales tax reports, and other records.

3/ The use of pri­vate tax col­lec­tors may cost more money than it brings in: “The I.R.S. had expected pri­vate com­pa­nies to col­lect $88 mil­lion but has now low­ered that to as little as $23 million…. When the costs of gov­ern­ment over­sight are added in, Ms. Olson said, the pro­gram may even lose money.”

4/ The Bush admin­is­tra­tion favors the use of pri­vate tax col­lec­tors “even though it acknowl­edged in tes­ti­mony to Con­gress that it was far less effi­cient than having the I.R.S. handle all collections.” The I.R.S. esti­mates that it can bring in $20 of tax rev­enue for every dollar it spends to col­lect that rev­enue. (The Bush admin­is­tra­tion esti­mates that pri­vate tax col­lec­tors bring in $5 for every dollar they receive, but remem­ber #3, above.)

5/ Eighty per­cent of penal­ties imposed on tax pre­par­ers are not being collected.