The Associated Press carried this story:
At a cost of nearly $42 million, the IRS wants you to know: Your check is almost in the mail.
The Internal Revenue Service is spending the money on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan.
The notices are going out this month to an estimated 130 million households who filed returns for the 2006 tax year, at a cost of $41.8 million, IRS spokesman John Lipold confirmed.
That works out to about 32 cents to print, process and mail each letter. ...
Why spend this money? The story quoted Keith Hennessey, director of the president's National Economic
Council:
"Any time you do something as a government tens of
millions of times, there is ample room for people to get confused. And
so if you're going to have tens of millions of taxpayers getting
checks, you want to get the information out so that you have as few
people as possible confused about what's happening, they understand
what's coming, and it reduces the number of incoming requests that IRS
and Treasury have to figure out how to deal with it," said Hennessey.
