Posted 9:37 AM by Creditwrench

An important email from Dan Meador

I'm pasting in Treasury Financial Management Service record system .014 particulars, relating to debt collection operations of the Treasury. Note that FMS has responsibility for collecting delinquent income taxes as well as all other delinquent debts owed to Government of the United States.

Thanks to Geri Powers of Maryland for forwarding this find from the Federal Register. She copied and pasted in the Treasury/FMS .014 system. I've copied & pasted in the URL where particulars of all FMS systems of records can be downloaded. For request details, see 31 CFR Part 1 as that particular Treasury regulation gives the method by which requests are supposed to be submitted to Treasury departments.

Particular thanks to Geri as she has been bird-dogging this issue since I constructively proved that FMS is the delegate of the Secretary of the Treasury something over a year ago.

Geri was responsible for my getting on this trail in late 1996. She was living in Las Vegas at the time. We visited by telephone two or three times, the primary subject being state-federal tax administration agreements. There was a bridge in some of the 26 CFR Part 301 regulations that linked to 5 U.S.C. § 5517, which authorizes agreements for withholding qualified state income taxes from federal personnel. While in the neighborhood, I read 5 U.S.C. § 5512, which specifies authorization necessary for litigation in the event federal personnel don't voluntarily agree to have wages garnished. In the footnotes I found that the General Accounting Office was general agent of the U.S. Treasury, then tracked back to the treasury act of 1921. Last summer when I was visiting with a GAO attorney via telephone, she provided cites for 1996 legislation in which Congress made the Director of the Office of Management and Budget responsible for settling accounts of the United States. The provision in Public Law 104-316 permits the Director to delegate authority. By wading through mountains of other legalese, I concluded that FMS operates under delegations of authority from the Director of OMB and the Secretary of the Treasury.

I'm not certain who was responsible, but two or three years ago Jack Cohen, Harry Combs (Informer/Big Al), Sean O'Hara or someone else stumbled across the Treasury Financial Manual (available on the FMS web page), and that identifies the consent form necessary to execute garnishment via notice of levy against government personnel.

The FMS system of records Geri forwarded this morning is frosting on the cake. As reading the thing, pay particular attention to the list of authorities for the system of records -- it's longer than a well rope, including several key Internal Revenue Code sections.

The Internal Revenue Service is delegate of the Secretary of the Treasury for purposes of 26 U.S.C. § 7701(a)(12)(B), which applies to insular possessions; the Financial Management Service is delegate for purposes of § 7701(a)(12)(A). IRS has certain limited functionary responsibilities through FMS -- IRS has absolutely no authority to unilaterally take involuntary collection action in States of the Union.
Click here for the rest of Dan's article