IRS routinely rehires fired workers
A new inspector general report has found that the IRS routinely rehires employees it has fired for cause, including some that have committed crimes.
Despite promises to Congress, the Internal Revenue Service has yet to take advantage of a red-flag alert system designed to prevent it from rehiring past employees with blots on their records, a watchdog found.
During the push to expand staff for the annual filing season, the tax agency is supposed to comply with a provision in the 2016 omnibus spending bill that requires a review of any rehire with past conduct or performance problems ranging from tax delinquency to falsification of documents to disruptiveness in the workplace.
But the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that more than 200 of 2,000-plus former employees “whom the IRS rehired between January 2015 and March 2016 had been previously terminated or separated from the tax agency while under investigation,” according to a report released on Thursday.
Worse, the rehires were not evenly spread. Some IRS offices were clearly more corrupt than others.
If you dig into the details of the report it appears that roughly ten percent of the rehires this season were previously dismissed for cause. But it wasn’t evenly spread across all of the offices. The Covington, Ky., office had 213 rehires examined and 96 of them were found to have been previously dismissed “while under investigation.”
That’s almost half the people this Kentucky office rehired, of whom a good percentage had been fired for literally breaking the law. Suggests that the management at that office might be complicit in these illegal acts.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
A new inspector general report has found that the IRS routinely rehires employees it has fired for cause, including some that have committed crimes.
Despite promises to Congress, the Internal Revenue Service has yet to take advantage of a red-flag alert system designed to prevent it from rehiring past employees with blots on their records, a watchdog found.
During the push to expand staff for the annual filing season, the tax agency is supposed to comply with a provision in the 2016 omnibus spending bill that requires a review of any rehire with past conduct or performance problems ranging from tax delinquency to falsification of documents to disruptiveness in the workplace.
But the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that more than 200 of 2,000-plus former employees “whom the IRS rehired between January 2015 and March 2016 had been previously terminated or separated from the tax agency while under investigation,” according to a report released on Thursday.
Worse, the rehires were not evenly spread. Some IRS offices were clearly more corrupt than others.
If you dig into the details of the report it appears that roughly ten percent of the rehires this season were previously dismissed for cause. But it wasn’t evenly spread across all of the offices. The Covington, Ky., office had 213 rehires examined and 96 of them were found to have been previously dismissed “while under investigation.”
That’s almost half the people this Kentucky office rehired, of whom a good percentage had been fired for literally breaking the law. Suggests that the management at that office might be complicit in these illegal acts.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The newspaper’s list of reasons for separation is vague and specific all at the same time. I work for .gov, and these issues seem like the usual smattering of issues for temp help.
19 had potential tax code violations
4 had accessed taxpayer accounts without authorization
13 had falsified forms
2 had misused email or equipment
6 had been accused of misconduct
Misusing email? Can be as simple as sending or receiving emails for non-work related purposes while on the clock. depending on the supervisor, and how the discipline is written, you can easily be let go from any fed agency for that.
The only ones in that list that bug me are the tax code violations and the ones let go for accessing tax records without authorization. The rest can be simply a supervisor needing a reason to start the discipline process on an underperforming employee.
If they were threatened with discipline and then voluntarily separated in lieu of prosecution, it can be difficult to find the paper trail on why they were let go unless the management in question dotted all their Is and crossed all their Ts.