When the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) makes a mistake, apparently they double down and do it again. And again. That appears to be what we learned earlier this week when our friends at the Tax Foundation reviewed a newly released investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Inspector General. One of the key findings in that report is that from January 2015 until March 2016, the IRS rehired approximately 2,000 former employees, at least 10% of whom had been “terminated for performance reasons.” But wait: there’s more:
Of the 213 terminated IRS employees who had been let go for performance reasons and subsequently rehired:
- Four had been terminated due to not paying their taxes;
- Four were let go for unauthorized access of taxpayer’s accounts;
- 13 for falsifying documents; and,
- Six for misconduct (including one with several theft convictions and a felony conviction for possession of a forgery device”.
It’s not exactly as if the IRS didn’t know they had a problem: a previous Inspector General’s report issued in December of 2014 showed that they previously rehired 824 employees who had been terminated.
Even more interesting is the fact that IRS hiring authorities, “do not have access to applicants’ IRS employment history records” meaning that this Groundhog Day scenario could repeat itself over and over…with American taxpayers suffering the consequences of extremely poor management.
You can read the complete blog report from the Tax Foundation including one startling example of IRS mis-management by clicking HERE.
