The IRS decision to move over a thousand of its human resource and IT employees to help with tax filing season is causing “chaos,” union president Doreen Greenwald said Tuesday.
The agency told these employees in early February they’d be placed on an involuntary detail starting Feb. 22 as a tax examiner or customer service representative for 120 days, though the timeline could get extended. It was a week into the tax filing season.
“There’s concerns about how well this filing season is going to go and are the right people assigned to that work,” Greenwald, the National Treasury Employees Union President, said, speaking to reporters at the union’s legislative conference.
It’s unclear if employees on the detail will be have their pay decreased, what work they will do and why certain employees were chosen, she added.
Greenwald estimates about 1,500 employees were put on detail. While surging employees typically happens with workers who process paper and answer phones, cross-division moves are unusual. NTEU represents roughly two-thirds of the nearly 75,000 IRS employees.
“It should send a red flag for everybody about what the status of this filing season is,” Greenwald said.
The choice to move employees comes after the IRS missed hiring goals for customer service workers ahead of the season. The mass exodus of workers last year to Trump administration resignation incentives and the longest government shutdown in US history made it harder for the agency to hire.
To contact the reporter on this story:
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Learn more about Bloomberg Tax or Log In to keep reading:
See Breaking News in Context
From research to software to news, find what you need to stay ahead.
Already a subscriber?
Log in to keep reading or access research tools and resources.