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Mountain Times

By Ron Fitzwater

Congresswoman Virginia Foxx circulated a letter to her fellow representatives on Capital Hill May 9th seeking support and co-sponsorship for legislation she believes will save 5th District taxpayers millions of dollars.

In the letter Foxx pointed out to colleagues that unlike many privately owned companies and some state governments, the federal government did not offer an option to send employee paycheck stubs electronically, resulting in millions of dollars in printing costs being paid for with tax dollars.

Foxx suggests that unlike traditional paper stubs, e-stubs ensure on-time delivery of payroll information and are safer and less susceptible to identity theft because they do not include private information such as social security numbers and home addresses.

Foxx is confident that she can get support in the congress for the bill simply on its merits.

“I feel certain that we will get a lot of co-sponsors for the bill because it is a good idea that will save a lot of money,” Foxx said.

Although the federal government employs nearly three-million people in dozens of agencies around the world Foxx said there would be no cost other than time for programming the system, but “just saving every pay stub having to be printed every month, and now some federal employees are going to be paid twice a month, it logically will save millions of dollars just because they won’t have to print those stubs. We already have everybody in a computer system to receive email and so folks will be able to get it through their e-mail. It would seem to me to be a fairly minor change to be made in the program to have the information simply sent to an e-mail address as opposed to having it printed out,” Foxx said.

Although Foxx is presenting the program as optional for federal employees she said that the future of the program if enacted could become mandatory depending on how fiscally conservative the majority of congress is but she doesn’t think that it would become mandatory anytime soon.

On how this legislation would benefit citizens in the 5th District, Foxx said that they were interested in how congress was spending their money.

“In my experience we have a lot of common sense people who are saying ‘cut federal government spending everywhere you can and this is one way to do it,” she said.