That Letter From the IRS? Someday It Could Be Written by a Bot

The Trump administration is testing technology designed to take the drudgery out of some workers’ duties.

Bots—software programs designed to perform specific repetitive tasks in a way that mimics human actions—are being looked at by a number of agencies, including the General Services Administration and the departments of Commerce and Treasury.

The idea is that by eliminating mindless duties, workers can focus on more “high-value work,” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said in a recent memo to agency heads.

Automating low-value work has its downside, one observer told Bloomberg Law.

“The vendors all present it as magical and simple, but there are a lot of complexities,” Charles Heckscher, a professor at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, told Bloomberg Law. The government generally relies on private-sector contractors to develop and implement its IT systems.

Different Job, Same Employee?

An employee who is good at entering data might not be good at higher-level tasks that involve using the data, Heckscher said.

“You try to use the same worker, and it doesn’t work out,” he said.

About 2.1 million people are civilian federal employees, including roughly 1.2 million union-represented workers. Jeff Pon, director of the Office of Personnel Management, and OMB Deputy Director Margaret Weichert have repeatedly said that IT modernization and updating the skills of federal employees are among the administration’s top HR priorities.

Federal agencies need to catch up with the private sector in how they use technology, both for providing services to the public and internally for managing work, Pon said in a recent interview with Bloomberg Law.

Mulvaney’s Aug. 27 memo directs agencies to use “robotics process automation” to reduce the burden of administrative tasks. This will allow federal employees to be more productive, he wrote. Agencies should document the hours of work saved by automation, he wrote.

The OMB declined to discuss its plans for implementing the Mulvaney memo, other than to say that quarterly updates on the government’s technology modernization plans are available on the performance.gov website.

You Already Know a Bot

People already encounter bots on a regular basis, Heckscher said. When people begin to enter information on restaurant reservation website Open Table, for instance, and the field self-populates, that’s done by a bot, he said.

“Bots will eliminate a lot of data entry work,” Heckscher said. “You won’t have people transferring data.”

The GSA is testing bots to see if they can be used in the context of federal contracting, Jeff Lau, a regional commissioner at the agency’s Federal Acquisition Service, told Bloomberg Law. Transferring information from one form to another takes hours for people but just minutes for the bots, he said. The GSA manages government real estate and oversees federal contracting and information technology services.

The aim is to put the bots into production by the end of this year, Lau said.

Generational Factors?

The government faces many backlogs on processing patent applications and security clearance requests, Bill Eggers, executive director at Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights, told Bloomberg Law. That work isn’t going away even with automation, which makes job losses less likely, he said.

The government’s demographics may make it easier for agencies to update their work processes, Eggers added.

“We have 600,000 federal employees who are over the age of 55,” he said. Only about 155,000 federal workers are younger than 30, which means there’s lots of potential for hiring people with updated skills as the older employees retire, Eggers said.

“Through attrition, you reorient jobs,” he said.

There is a big imbalance between the generations in the federal government, Mallory Barg Bulman, vice president for research and evaluation at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, told Bloomberg Law.

Only about 6 percent of the federal workforce is under the age of 30, she said. For federal IT jobs, the disparity is even more stark, she said.

“There are five times more people over the age of 60 than under the age of 30,” Bulman said.

Retraining Ahead?

Agencies looking to update how they get work done will have union support if they train employees and communicate with them, Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, told Bloomberg Law.

Job cuts shouldn’t be a byproduct of automation, he said. “It takes oversight to make sure technology is operating properly,” which current employees can provide, Lenkart said.

NFFE, an AFL-CIO affiliate, represents about 110,000 federal workers, including 5,000 GSA employees.