GINGRICH TOUTS PLAN TO POLL PUBLIC ON IRS.

Byline: Richard W. Stevenson The New York Times

After spending several months castigating the Internal Revenue Service for harassing taxpayers, Congress is now considering a plan to spend more than $30 million to ask taxpayers what they think of the tax-collection agency.

The plan, developed by Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., calls for a voluntary 14-question survey to be mailed to every taxpayer early next year, and for the survey forms also to be made available through tax-return preparers and software programs.

``For less than 50 cents a return, we think every American who pays taxes deserves the right to tell the government how well it collects their money,'' Gingrich said Thursday.

The Clinton administration and congressional Democrats said they had no objections to hearing what taxpayers think about the IRS. But they said Gingrich's survey would be statistically unsound because disgruntled taxpayers would be most likely to bother to fill out the questionnaire.

Moreover, they said, the Republicans are hoping to make the tax-collection system a political issue next year. Therefore, they said, the survey is an inappropriate use of taxpayer money - especially since Congress already had a professional poll taken on attitudes toward the IRS earlier this year and paid only $20,000 for it.

In that poll, conducted for a congressional commission, 48 percent of respondents said customer service by the IRS was excellent or good, vs. 44 percent who said it was not so good or poor. It also found that 58 percent of respondents felt that tax forms were difficult to complete because of complexities in the tax code, vs. 10 percent who attributed the difficulties to IRS inefficiency.

On Wednesday, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill to give taxpayers more rights in disputes with the IRS and create an oversight board made up largely of private citizens. The Senate will take up similar legislation, probably early next year.

The Clinton administration noted Thursday that the costs of Gingrich's survey, estimated by Republican aides at $30 million to $35 million out of an IRS budget of more than $7 billion, would mean less money for the IRS to spend on other things. Given the intense pressure from Congress upon the IRS to improve the service it provides and to modernize its computer system, spending millions of dollars on the survey would seem to send a contradictory signal about Congress' priorities, administration officials said.

Linda Robinson, an assistant Treasury Department secretary for legislative affairs, said in a letter to the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday that it ``would ill serve the American taxpayer to spend an inordinately large amount of money on an unscientific survey whose results could provide misleading guidance'' about how to improve the tax system.

In response, Gingrich said the administration's opposition to the survey was part of a long pattern of defending the IRS.