IRS supervisors are using quotas for how many investigations and seizures agents launch against taxpayers as criteria in their performance evaluations, despite the fact the practice that has been illegal since 1998, according to a government watchdog.
A growing number of tax agency bosses are declining to verify whether IRS employees are using discrimination or intimidation in their dealings with taxpayers.
Those findings are contained in an audit report made public Thursday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
The TIGTA report said too many managers within the federal tax agency are improperly skewing the criteria they use to assess employee performance.
The IRS Restructuring and Reform Act, which President Clinton signed into law in 1998, was intended to improve the “customer service” and “modernize” the agency.
It was sparked by a series of widely publicized congressional hearings that spotlighted massive abuse of taxpayers by excessively aggressive IRS agents and policies.
The law bans supervisors from relying on how many taxpayer crackdowns an individual initiates when weighing his or her performance.
The purpose of the ban is to prevent the agency from establishing actual or de facto quotas for the number of investigations tax agents launch.
But the TIGTA report said some IRS supervisors still use such records when evaluating their workers, while others have used the amount of money or property seizures their employees collected as an alternative means of establishing quotas.
TIGTA also found some IRS supervisors are ignoring employees’ history of interacting with taxpayers in about a quarter of the cases it examined.
The 1998 law requires managers to consider whether IRS agents interact with taxpayers in a “tone which is discriminatory, discourteous, disrespectful, intimidating” or which “misstate the facts.”
Managers must also assess in their performance reviews whether an employee “takes improper actions that place a taxpayer in hardship condition.”
Some IRS supervisors decline to locate their workers’ history in this area, while prizing accomplishments such as the amount of money an agent has taken from taxpayers or the number of people an agent has flagged for potential fraud.
Although the IRS was in full compliance with the law in 2012, TIGTA found the tax agency was using enforcement records in employee evaluations in 2013.
As a result, TIGTA reported it has found 82 violations of the 1998 law regarding employee performance evaluations thus far in 2014.
Go here to read the full TIGTA report.
