Internal Revenue Service enforcement officers last year collected about $12 billion more from would-be tax scofflaws than they did three years ago, commissioner Mark Everson said Monday in Kansas City.

Everson was visiting Kansas City for the official opening of the new $370 million tax processing center built around the old Kansas City Main Post Office at 315 Pershing Road.

Earlier Monday, Everson met with The Kansas City Star’s editorial board and talked about IRS enforcement. Full numbers aren’t yet calculated, but preliminary estimates indicate that IRS enforcement revenue, or the funds that are recovered by examiners questioning individual and business tax returns, approached $49 billion in the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. That would be up from $37 billion in 2003, which was a recent low point for collections, Everson said.

Everson said the gains reflect a rebalancing of IRS priorities that went askew in the late 1990s when the service was focused on mending massive customer service problems publicized in congressional hearings at the time. Service officials were so intent on fixing those problems that, at one point, the IRS reduced the number of revenue agents on its enforcement staff by one-fourth.

“It was exactly the wrong time to do that,” Everson said.

“That was about the time that corporate governance began coming off track” and setting the stage for Enron-scale accounting scandals, he said. “At the same time, there was the beginning of a real erosion of ethics among lawyers and others who began peddling all kinds of tax shelters.”

The IRS began restoring emphasis to its enforcement arm in 2003, and collections from tax abusers have been climbing since then, he said.

Everson estimated that for every enforcement dollar IRS collects, the increased policing also generates at least $3 from taxpayers who might have been tempted to cheat but chose not to.

“It’s like when a state trooper is parked by a billboard with a radar gun,” Everson said. “Everyone drives more carefully.”

Following the editorial board meeting, Everson participated in the dedication of the new Kansas City IRS facility. The event was attended by several hundred guests and employees.

A Boy Scout color guard from Covenant Presbyterian Church began the ceremony. Sonja Coombes, an IRS worker, then filled the “Main Street” corridor that connects the 1.14 million-square-foot complex with a rousing rendition of the national anthem.

Also attending the ceremony were Sen. Kit Bond, who had a critical role shepherding the project through Washington, and Tom McDonnell, president and chief executive of DST Systems, whose subsidiary, Pershing Road Development, developed and leased the project to the government.

The new center is one of just three in the U.S. that will be handling individual taxpayers’ electronic and paper returns as well as the first among 10 centers to be remodeled over time to reflect an IRS reorganization under way for six years now.

Reproduced with permission of The Kansas City Star © Copyright 2006 The Kansas City Star. All rights reserved. Format differs from original publication. Not an endorsement.

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