To keep you informed of IRS Commissioner Mark Everson's latest antics, we bring you this from American Public Media's Marketplace. Yesterday, they aired a great piece on the outsourcing of IRS collections. The nut of the story is this: The IRS wants to outsource the job of collecting outstanding taxes due and let the collection agency keep a percent of haul. Sounds great - the IRS gets some money it wouldn't have otherwise - the budget fares that much better. The rub? It's been done before and it ended up costing taxpayers $18 million when it was tried in 1996.

So why embark on a money-losing scheme?

KEVIN MCCORMALLY [of Kiplingers Magazine]: Congress will not give the IRS a dime to hire more employees. Because, no one's ever lost an election beating up on the IRS, so the IRS has been told to go out and hire private debt collectors, even though it's going to cost 20 to 25 cents on a dollar to collect these debts with the private people, versus maybe 3 to 5 cents on a dollar if they hired employees.

Marketplace: "Legislators keep rejecting, IRS keeps collecting"